The gender realist story goes like this: everyone has an infallible sense of themselves as a male, female, or non-binary person. This is your gender identity. To be clear, it isn’t your sex, your chromosomes or body. Its basis might be biological, mental or even spiritual. In any case, your gender identity alone tells us when to treat you as a man, woman, or non-binary person. You could keep your male body, intend to keep it forever, and be no less of a woman for it.
Gender critics tell a different story: your sex characteristics make you a man or woman, and decide whether we should treat you as such. There are no special gender identities, no male, female, or non-binary spirits. Instead, a person has attitudes toward the expectations society pins to their sex characteristics. The woman is the person who carried the child, say, not the person who cares for them. No one is non-binary; there are only people who reject traditional social expectations.
Let Women Speak held a series of gender critical events in Australia and New Zealand last month. The media focussed on a group of neo-Nazis who gatecrashed the Melbourne event and performed a Nazi salute on the steps of Parliament. This is tragic. All the speakers at the Melbourne event were women, as were most of the attendees; some were Indigenous, lesbian, or Jewish. The other events were similar.
Some responded with violence. Protesters hospitalised a woman in Melbourne. They assaulted attendees and speakers in Auckland; one punched a seventy-two-year-old woman in the face. Others, including many journalists, responded with intense condemnation. Daniel Andrews called Let Women Speak ‘hateful’ and ‘harmful’. John Pesutto and Adam Bandt used similar language.
These reactions are shocking and strange, given many Australians hold a gender critical view. Many experts on sex and gender do as well; it may even be the main expert view. More importantly, no one has an unassailable basis from which to deny the validity of this view.
The conflict over these Let Women Speak events demonstrates the need for a more deliberate approach in which opposing views might coexist peacefully. Religious disagreement can help us see this better.
Imagine an atheist saying we should harm Christians because they’re wrong about God and the soul. Suppose another atheist says laws should not be based on Christianity because its system of beliefs is wrong. Arguably, the view of the second atheist is also incompatible with Christianity, and Christians may even find it offensive. They’d likely struggle, though, to classify an atheist who demonstrated an unwillingness to base laws on Christianity as hateful or harmful.
'Religious disagreement also helps us see how we could manage disagreement about gender identity. As with religious disagreements, we should aim for our disagreements about gender to be accurate and civil.'
The gender critical view is like the second atheist view. It says there are no such things as gender identities. It says those attitudes some people believe are gender identities shouldn’t shape our laws or social norms. Nothing here implies hating or harming anyone.
Do gender critics deny transpeople exist? If they do, then it’s in a limited sense. Atheists believe Christians are mistaken about souls (and so mistaken about what constitutes each of us) and they believe baptism changes nothing whatsoever about our being. That being the case, should Christians call them ‘hateful’ or ‘harmful’?
We’d still have no reason to blame the atheist even if there were no good reasons to doubt Christianity. There are, of course reasons to doubt, as many Christians know, and fundamental disagreements between atheists and Christians are intractable. You could gather the best arguments and evidence, in good faith, and conclude God and souls exist, or not. There’s no single proof or decisive experiment. Similarly, you could gather the best arguments and evidence and conclude gender identities exist, or not. Our inner lives, our senses of self, are private. If we were to discover gendered brains, say, we’d fail to show whether these were born or made.
Religious disagreement also helps us see how we could manage disagreement about gender identity. As with religious disagreements, we should aim for our disagreements about gender to be accurate and civil.
The law is more complex. A free society would have few issues; it would allow sports teams to affirm or deny gender identities, it would allow women to run domestic violence shelters that exclude transwomen. Australia isn’t a free society, at least to this degree. Its laws sometimes force people to come together, or to act against their conscience. There is, though, a patchwork of religious accommodations. Similarly, we could have gender critical schools. Alternatively, parents could withdraw their children from classes on gender identity. Gender critical clinicians could declare conscientious objections to gender affirmation.
Accommodation and toleration have their limits. No state could use both gender identity and sexual characteristics for the same purposes. People who identify as men or women are not the same group as people with the relevant sex characteristics. Conflicts would also arise if a state were to use them for different purposes. Some would seek access to spaces others meant to exclude them from, even given third spaces. People who identify as women want us to treat them like people with female sex characteristics, not a separate class.
Whatever our solutions, as with religious disagreement, we should practice humility and generosity. These virtues are more than moral — they make peaceful, free cooperation possible.
Sam Kiss is a writer and researcher based in Melbourne, Australia. He has a DPhil in Politics (political philosophy) from the University of Oxford, where he also taught.
Main image: Let Women Speak rally in Auckland. (Dean Purcell)