This book is five years in the making. The day in April 2019 when I dared tweet that women have sex-based rights was a day that was going to change my life, though I did not know it then. I thought I had said something obvious, banal even. But I knew already that for some reason my colleagues had become eerily silent about this obvious fact. What happened next is a matter of public record.[1] The usual litany of online abuse, death threats sent to my university email account, calls for me to be fired, disciplined, silenced. There is nothing special in what happened to me, unfortunately. Many women suffered a worse fate. If there is one thing that I will not countenance is to be told what to think, so that day in April 2019 meant the beginning of five years of research. For five years I have read and researched all aspects of gender identity theory.
Although gender identity and trans rights seem to be everywhere, actually researching them in a scientific manner proved elusive. All the literature I accessed took for granted the existence of gender identity, without any objective evidence of it. Like sand, the more I tried to hold it, the more it escaped my grasp. Used to apply legal logic to propositions, I was faced with a plethora of logical fallacies. At times, I thought I may be losing my mind. Were my colleagues really serious when they said some men are women inside? Had they not thought of the legal, political and social consequences of such a proposition? Had they not realised how sexist it was to claim all women think and feel in a certain “feminine” way and that men can know and mimic this?
At times it felt really lonely work. Debating this issue was almost impossible. The “No debate” injunction silenced academics and made us walk on eggshells on social media, where a pronoun could get you permanently suspended. Fortunately, I found a community of like-minded people, mostly women, with whom to share information, and to laugh and bond over the absurdity of it all. These women made these last five years endurable and enjoyable. They are too many to list, they know who they are and this book is dedicated to them.
The book is not dedicated to my academic colleagues, but it is addressed to them. I counted on them to ask and answer the questions I ask in this book, to engage, to debate, to argue and defend their position, if they had one. As I often quipped, lawyers who debated earnestly whether Jaffa Cakes were biscuit or cake, refused to answer the question “what is a woman.” With very few exceptions, academics refused to engage on this issue, though some of them told me privately they agreed with me, but they could not say so publicly. Some wrote to me to tell me to stop talking. I dare say that they did not understand what academic freedom of speech is, and that it does not only grant us more latitude than the general public in expressing our opinion in the academic marketplace of ideas, but it enjoins us to use this freedom. It is not just a right. It is actually our job, for which we get paid, to research, without fear, and go where research takes us, not to lead research to the conclusions we want to reach.
The results of these five years of research are contained in this book. There is so much more that could be said, as gender identity theory is having an effect in almost all areas of public life, from sports, to prisons, to schools, to hospitals, to Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual (LGB) rights. The book focuses on the effect of gender identity theory on international institutions and international law more generally. It is not just a critique, but a plea to reframe this concept and give it its proper place in human rights law as a belief, not shared by all, and not to be imposed either as a form of social control or via legal rules. It seems an immense task, as gender identity has been embedded in international and domestic law and, more troublingly, has generated a whole new area of medicine, dedicated to the disruption of the physical and intellectual development of children on the basis of a presumed disconnect between mind and body, a suspicious distinction in medicine if there ever was one. Children are being reinforced in their delusion that their body is somehow wrong and in need of being fixed through a litany of medication and surgeries. Females are, as always, especially targeted. The female body has always been the locus of exploitation and othering, from Eve born out of the rib of Adam, all the way to the nullification of femaleness in girls barely old enough to know what their body is like, before they know what a female body is capable of doing.
I did not set out to write a book about feminist international law, but simply a book where international law is taken seriously and not bent out of shape to accommodate an ideology. And I speak about ideology not necessarily as a pejorative term, but simply to outline the difference between the claim that “some people” have a gender identity (a belief, or a theory) and the claim that “everyone” has a gender identity, even if they do not know it, or they disagree with the concept of gender identity (an ideology). The moment in which international law accepted as a definition the idea that all human beings have a gender identity, it transformed this theory into an ideology. The push to make this definition mandatory in social interactions and legislative acts risks transforming this concept from an ideological one to a totalitarian one. The fact that I cannot say I do not have a gender identity without receiving some form of abuse should make all academics stand up and take notice. Why is my belief in the idea of gender identities necessary for the protection of gender identities? International law does not require that beliefs are universally shared in order to grant individuals the right to hold them. It is a crucial principle, in human rights law, that only the right of people to hold a belief is protected, not the belief itself, and that human rights law does not impose on individuals the duty to respect any particular set of beliefs, but only to respect the right of people to hold them.
I did end up writing a sort of feminist international law book, in the sense that I always centred women in gender identity theory, to investigate the effects on women and girls of the momentous change demanded by gender identity theorists. I found out quite early on in my work that there are two reactions to any criticism of gender identity theory: the first one, that this theory does not affect women; in fact, we benefit from it (though no-one can really point to any such material benefit for women specifically); the second, it does affect women, but the disadvantage to women is worth it, because “transwomen” are the most oppressed women, and we “cis women” have cis privilege. We are supposed to believe that Iranian women killed for refusing to wear a veil, Afghan girls prevented from going to school, even newborn girls killed because of their sex, are privileged compared to Jennifer Pritzker, American billionaire who decided to “become a woman” at the age of 63. This work cannot help being a feminist book, in the sense that it refuses to see international law through the lens of gender identity theory. It refuses to un-see sex in order to elevate gender identity to preminence. I know there are many who will accuse me of not being a feminist because I am not a trans-inclusive feminist. This work is not an activist’s work, so I do not have to prove what brand of feminism I support. It is a book about international law and its uneasy relationship with gender identity theory. It is not only about that, it is also a proposal to reframe this relationship on an altogether different basis, more firmly grounded on established principles and rules of international law.
Finally, the title. “A Certain Inconvenience” is how the Goodwin Court described what society has to bear in order for transsexual people to enjoy their “rights.” I cannot think of any other civil rights movement that is premised on the idea that their rights are an inconvenience for society at large. As it turns out, it is women who have to bear more than a certain inconvenience, as this book will show.
I am not going to name names in acknowledging and thanking people, not least because some of the women are still anonymous for their own safety. So I will thank the deeds. To those who supported me and made me laugh in these five years. To those who helped me in my work and who reassured me I was not going insane for holding on to reality. To all the feminists who rejected “Be kind” as their new slogan and their new command.
[1] And by this I mean that it was played out on social media, where I used my name and that the consequences were the source of some attention from German media, where I lived and worked at the time. The Frankfurter Allgemaine Zeitung published a largely sympathetic article on the phenomenon of cancel culture in academia using my story as an example: Thomas Thiel,“Ende einer Treibjagd,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 28, 2022, https://www.faz.net/aktuell/karriere-hochschule/hoersaal/cancel-culture-rufmord-kampagne-an-der-universitaet-lueneburg-18328668.html.
I have come to the conclusion that gender identity laws are not about transsexuals at all but are a first step in putting in place rights for synthetic humans. The children and young adults being medicalised and experimented on are just the cannon fodder for the steps towards transhumanism. Why else are governments all across the world going along with this insanity. They have their hands tied behind their backs due to world trade agreements and other UN agreements that cannot be apart of unless they go along with this complete bollocks.
Alessandra, where can I buy your book? I’m hoping I can get it on Kindle as my vision is poor.