So, on the one hand, …. I find myself befuddled by the North Carolina “bathroom law” and other extreme responses to transgender rights and the assertion of transgender identity. I say this as someone who generally appreciates the force of conservative views of sex and sexuality even when I disagree with them. For example, though I fully support same-sex marriage, I am on record arguing that the debate was more complex than partisans on either side wanted to admit.
But the transgender question is different.
I do understand some basic premises of the “traditionalist” position. (I use the term “traditionalist” simply as shorthand here, not to derogate the value or legitimate power of “tradition.”)
Simply put, I think it is right that human beings are both embodied and embedded creatures.
We are embodied in the sense that biology matters. We are not simply the products of our own will or emotions, but also of our bodies. And sexual difference is a fundamental biological fact, not only for human beings but for most species on Earth. To be sure, we are not reducible to our sexual differences. Nor should our sexual differences determine our status or rights or occupations or ambitions in life. But sexual difference is not nothing.
We are also embedded. We are not merely lone selves, but parts of larger social structures. And one of those structures is the male-female pair with its capacity and responsibility to reproduce the species. Not all human beings fit into this particular structure. For that matter, reproduction – in the broader sense of taking responsibility for raising and nurturing children – neither needs to be nor should be limited to the structure of male-female pairs. That’s one reason that I support same-sex marriage. Moreover, the particular forms that the social structures of male and female identity have taken in man societies, including our own, has often been profoundly oppressive and constraining of individual human potential. But the basic abstract structure – and the sexual identities that come together to form it – are still a vital part of the larger human constitution.
None of this, though, justifies the hostility to assertions of transgender identity and transgender rights.
Traditionalists want to maintain the male-female binary. Fair enough. But it’s a basic philosophical truism that even fundamental binaries are not undone by intermediate cases or complex exceptions. The existence of dawn, dusk, and solar eclipses does not refute the binary of day and night.
Moreover, many transgender persons (not all, about which more below) are themselves committed to the basics of the male-female binary; they simply find that their identity doesn’t match certain features of the anatomy with which they were born or doesn’t fit comfortably into the dichotomy at all. Just compare today’s bathroom fights to those of an earlier era: Most transgender persons don’t want to “desegregate” public bathrooms with respect to gender. They simply ask for the same sense of comfort and privacy in sex-segregated bathrooms that everyone else enjoys. (Desegregating bathrooms might not be such a bad idea. A common washing area with separate stalls wouldn’t be the end of the world. More generally, it is silly to think that the male-female binary – even if embraced in its fullest – should by itself dictate the form of particular institutions such as public bathrooms. But that’s an argument for another day.)
Traditionalists also want to maintain the link between sexual identity and “biological sex.” Again, fair enough. But biology is complex. Even the most insistent traditionalists have to admit that we’ve always had intersex individuals and atypical sexual identities. Well, if we are truly embodied creatures, then we also need to acknowledge that our genes and our hormones and our neurological connections are just as much aspects of our biology as our external anatomy. (In particular, while our minds might not be reducible to our brains, our brains are central to our biology.) And nothing in a commitment to the male-female binary as a basic feature of both our biology and our social constitution should preclude the possibility that, for some people, anatomy, genetics, hormones, and neurology do not all line up exactly and that these mismatches can sometimes lead to great anguish and confusion until some reworking of identity is put in place. For some transgender persons, that means readapting their anatomy. For others, it doesn’t. For some, who are “genderqueer” or “third gender” or the like, it means embracing an identity outside the usual binary. But, if we are truly embodied creatures, then these more complicated forms of embodiment should not be surprising. And if we are truly embedded creatures – embedded not only in male-female structures but in larger networks of empathy and social and political support and understanding – then it is precisely the wrong reaction to deny their reality as part of the larger social and legal fabric.
So the traditionalist position is, to my mind, an overreaction, an unnecessary extrapolation from understandable premises to cruel conclusions – cruel because they force transgender persons to violate their own sense of integrity and potentially subject them to violence and vilification. Traditionalists here flirt with bigotry, though many of them are not bigoted in their souls. And their position, fairly or not, too easily evokes earlier regimes of discrimination that tried to ground themselves on distorted claims about biology and society.
On the other hand, … the traditionalist reaction does unwittingly reveal a real tension in the transgender and queer rights movement. For while it’s true that most people with complex sexual identities simply want to be respected for who they are, there is also a more ideological strain of the movement that makes more sweeping claims. Theorists and activists who take this more critical view either want to deny the male-female binary at its core, or argue that all sexual or gender identity exists on a spectrum. They treat the experience of transgender persons, not as exceptional, but as emblematic of a deeper truth. They also extrapolate from the simple fact that our conceptions of gender roles and some aspects of gender expression are indeed largely socially constructed to the more tenuous conclusion that the basic binary of sexual identity can be overcome by a more enlightened politics and psychology.
This view goes well beyond the sort of assertion of transgender rights that Attorney General Lynch so eloquently spoke about not long ago. It also runs smack, not merely into traditionalist objections to such rights, but to the underlying traditional premises that, as I said, seem reasonable as far as they go, that we are both embodied and embedded creatures – embodied in certain facts of our biology, however complex and varied those facts might be, and embedded in social structures and purposes that transcend mere social construction.
Just as important, this more ideological position seems to be grounded in one or more of four assumptions or arguments of its own, premises that deserve some examination.
The first is simply the same philosophical fallacy that helps to motivate the other side: that the legitimacy of categories such as male and female is undone by the acceptance of intermediate cases or complex exceptions. Traditionalists fear this undoing and some queer theorists welcome it. But the fallacy is the same. In fact, the symmetry here is stunning, as it is in many other such deep debates.
The second assumption is what might be called a sort of anti-essentialist essentialism: the conviction that the felt experience of some transgender or queer folks as living outside the usual male-female binary reflects a universal truth that the rest of us don’t yet have the insight to see. But this is also merely the mirror image of the faulty traditionalist assumption that the felt experience of folks who clearly identity as male or female must be the norm for everybody.
The third assumption is more normative: that the dignity and equality of persons who are transgender, genderqueer, and the like is diminished if we think of them as exceptions to a more general, deeply-embodied and deeply-embedded, pattern of human life. But this is a fallacy too. Empathy, fraternity, and respect for human particularity do not require the dissolving of core presumptions. (I’ve made a similar argument in the same-sex marriage context.)
The fourth assumption, though, is more complicated and interesting than any of the first three. Some queer theorists and activists – and I need to emphasize some – believe that only by destabilizing the male-female binary can we liberate ourselves from all the stereotypes, power structures, and injustices, as well as the sexual constraints, of the gender system. They build on some important insights – that gendered behavior is largely socially constructed and socialized and performative – but then go on to insist that truly discovering who we are as human beings requires both stripping away the baggage of culture and unsettling what appear to most of us to be truly fundamental aspects of the self. In that sense, these theorists and activists are appealing to us to enlighten ourselves about who we really are and at the same time calling us to radical change.
I don’t think that this position is right. We are, as I have said, both embodied and embedded creatures, and there is, I am still convinced, a certain irreducible relationship between the two. Moreover, while some dimensions of our culture are indeed oppressive, the fact of culture – in all its conscious and unconscious dimensions – is both necessary to, and wonderfully affirming of, our very existence as social beings. Culture should always be subject to critique, but the most effective critiques arise from the depths of culture itself as well as from the impulse to decency and empathy.
But I might be proven wrong in my skepticism about these more deconstructive ideologies of gender. We’ll see.
The bathroom fights are unnecessary (though perhaps explainable, like so much else these days, as symbolic skirmishes in our hyper-polarized political war of all against all.) Traditionalists who write laws that insist, for example, that even bearded transsexual men who happen to have been born as anatomic females should use women’s bathrooms, are just being silly, not to mention oppressive and unjust. And most of the country is more than happy to respect the individual rights of transgender and other folks. But the current fight is also both a harbinger of, and a distraction from, a more profound debate down the road. The deeper challenge lurking here, going well beyond individual rights, is to our collective identity as human beings.
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