I have recently completed a monograph on the concept of gender identity in international law. It is titled Gender Identity - A Certain Inconvenience, and it will be hopefully out before the Summer with Cambridge Scholars Publishers. The most difficult task in writing the book was selecting the language. For starters, I did not want to be held to ransom by pronouns, which means that I avoided using third person pronouns when these would have signalled my rebellion to gender ideology. If you think this is easy, try providing a summary of a court case without ever referring to the applicant with pronouns. And I resented every line of it. Even NOT using pronouns is a limitation of our academic freedom and freedom of speech.
And then, of course, it is the issue of how to refer to people who are referred to as ‘trans women’ and ‘trans men’ by gender identity ideologists and often as ‘transwomen’ and ‘transmen’ by those who want to distance themselves from gender identity ideology. I did not want to do that, even if I often adopt these words on social media for brevity and ease of understanding. Still, I dislike these terms. Men who claim a female identity are not any kind of woman, and vice-versa. The appropriation of our language is the first, necessary step in the appropriation of our rights, and I want to resist that. Additionally, I do not believe people are ‘trans’ though I may, on my nicer days, of which not many are left, grant them the right to refer to themselves as such. Finally, I was writing a law book, and I felt a compulsion to adopt legally accurate language. Unfortunately, the law is not, in this field, accurate at all. The Equality Act 2010 speaks of people with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment, a bit of a mouthful, or transsexuals. In this sense, a ‘transwoman’ would be a transsexual man, and a ‘transman’ a transsexual woman. Legally accurate, at least in the context of the EA, but also very seldom adopted. The Gender Recognition Act 2004 speaks of people with an acquired gender and although it refers to transsexualism, it never uses the term transsexual. The more recent Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 uses the terms ‘female-to-male transgender person’ and ‘male-to-female transgender person.’ In international law, the term LGBT is used and of course includes the trans category. More specific gender identity ideology language is contained in the Yogyakarta and Yogyakarta+10 Principles, but those are not law. I could use transgender man and transgender woman, but gender identity ideology has corrupted language so much, it would engender a considerable amount of confusion, even if I explained my linguistic choices.
At first I adopted MtF and FtM respectively for men who claim to be women and women who claim to be men. The distinction that is sometimes made between individuals who undergo medical and/or surgical treatment and those who do not seems irrelevant to me and has lost legal significance in most jurisdictions in any event, so there is little sense upholding it. Not because, as the European Court of Human Rights would have it, it is not necessary to undergo any physical change to be recognised in one’s preferred ‘legal gender’ (a category I do not accept), but because no matter what one does, sex remains unchanged and the law should reflect that. No matter how many surgical procedures one has, down to replacing internal organs with those of a younger person, the law will not amend their date of birth.
However, I remain very uneasy in adopting language that creates, seemingly, a presumption that one can indeed transition from being a female to being a male and viceversa. Using the acronyms MtF and FtM does not negate this basic concession to gender ideology. ‘Gender critical’ people often adopt the acronyms TiM and TiF, for trans-identified male and trans-identified female. These are more accurate, but have never been used in any legal text. As a woman who is against any concession to gender ideology, I may approve of them, but I am not convinced they belong in a law monograph.
As I reflect on these linguistic choices, I realise how many constraints are put upon those who try to write critically about gender identity ideology even before we put pen to paper, or, more realistically, fingers to keyboard. And I remember that we are always constrained in our speech and our writing, by social and legal rules. By and large, we accept them, and even embrace them, because we have no desire for example to lie in what we write, or to be gratuitously offensive, though we may defend the right to be offensive as part of our freedom of expression. So why this sense of deep unease? Certainly because gender identity ideology compels us to lie, instead of encouraging us to tell the truth and presents truth as offensive, demanding we lie ‘to be kind’ while inflicting the most unkind verbal violence on ourselves.
So I am sitting here and instead of feeling elation, or pride, or satisfaction for having completed a manuscript and having a publisher, surely an accomplishment for any academic, even an unemployed one as I am, I am torturing myself on my linguistic choices and what they say about my commitment to remain objective and respectful of the truth and reality.