We need to move on to the next stage in our struggle against transgenderism,
that is moving beyond confronting individual challenges such as men entering
women’s spaces, sports and opportunities to opposing the idea and practice of
transgenderism itself. I am going to talk today about how the concept and
expression of something called ‘gender identity’ on the part of men who
impersonate women is an insult to us. You may wonder what is new about that,
so many women now recognise that today after the great activism and successes
of the now worldwide movement for women’s sex-based rights. But I do not
think that the insult of transgenderism to women is fully realised. There is an
inclination on the part of many feminist activists to find an acceptable reason
for the exclusion of men with gender identities, such as women’s safety, without
opposing the very idea of transgenderism. This is completely understandable. It
may seem to make sense tactically since most of the public understands such
emergencies as the threat to women if men with gender identities are in
women’s prisons or masquerading as women as leaders of the girls’ scouts on
overnight trips. The public, we may feel, are not yet ready for understanding
why it is a problem that men impersonate women at all.
It is also understandable because of a desire for safety against the intense fury
and hatred that result if women do speak out. In the UK after all the police will
arrest women and visit their homes to raid their bookshelves and, as in the case
of a woman in the UK recently, who put up stickers saying that men cannot be
women, confiscating an academic book critical of the transgendering of children
as if it was Mein Kampf. Except that they would probably have left Mein
Kampf behind. If women mute their fury and concentrate on criticising specific
egregious examples of men’s intrusion and threat rather than the very concept of
transgenderism, the idea that men can become women itself, they may escape
the most severe forms of punishment.
I am hugely impressed by and appreciative of the work of my feminist sisters in
defending women’s sex-based rights. It worries me though to see some
feminists who describe themselves as ‘gender critical’ saying on social media
and websites that they are not ‘transphobes’, and saying that they support
something called ‘trans’ rights. I do understand that these feminists are seeking
to protect themselves from the very real fear of being punished. They are
probably lying because I find it hard to believe that they are really in favour of
something called trans rights. Trans is an invention, a form of sexual fantasy for
the majority of the male hobbyists who adhere to it. Men who play act a ‘gender
2
identity’ in public are not an oppressed minority in the way that others who are
oppressed on the grounds of sex, race, class and sexuality are. The idea that
their identities should be taken seriously and enshrined in law is not just
insulting but detonates a bomb under all the huge amounts of work that
feminists and all those concerned with social justice have been doing for
decades. I do think that all those involved in feminist activism against the
demands of men who impersonate women know all of this, and I shall say more
about the dangerous way in which the concept of identity is eroding social
justice later.
The term ‘gender critical’ itself, though it may appeal because it is
unthreatening, implies that there are just some bits of gender that are
problematic and some bits, perhaps, that can be saved. Radical feminists, on the
other hand, understand that ‘gender’, which means ‘sex role stereotypes’, needs
to be abolished in its entirety. Radical feminists are not ‘critical’ of gender, we
work towards the world where it no longer exists. ‘Gender critical’ is a polite
term used so as not to sound too confrontational. I argue that the very existence
of the idea that men can be women, let alone its expression in public, is
insulting. This is generally recognised in relation to transracialism and even
transableism, in which mostly men seek sexual excitement by pretending to
have a disability, but not in relation to the different ways in which men imitate
women for sexual excitement or for entertainment.
It is interesting to consider why the behaviour in which members of the ruling
class of men imitate and mock members of the subordinate class of women, is
seen as positive or at least something that needs to be respected and to earn its
practitioners the status of a rights bearing category. Similar behaviour, after all,
in which white people adopt and act out stereotypes of Black people for their
own amusement, which is called blackface, is despised and called out by all
people who see themselves as right thinking and progressive. The men and
women who imitate other cultures and ethnicities do not pose a threat of
physical or sexual violence to women and girls and their number is small, but
their practice even in just going to a fancy dress party in the costume of an
equality category which is not their own, is excoriated. I argue that this
distinction is false.
I shall talk today about all of the forms of what can reasonably be called
womanface, the behaviour in which men impersonate women. It takes three
forms. The majority of the men who impersonate women are what used to be
called in sexology, the science of sex, transvestites, i.e. heterosexual men who
are sexually excited by acting out what they understand to be women’s
3
subordination through clothing, hormones or surgeries. A minority of female
impersonators are gay men who are unhappy about loving men without
pretending to be women. I will also cover another category of gay men, those
who perform as drag queens. This is now a serious career path as drag becomes
more and more dominant in western culture and drag queens appear on TV
competitions, on panels and talk shows, as celebrities, all through the mockery
of women. All of these men are included under the umbrella of transgenderism
in the definitions of organisations devoted to what they call ‘transgender rights’.
All of these men do womanface.
Those who are gender critical but nonetheless respect what they refer to as
‘trans rights’ do not define exactly what they respect and what they do not, but
there seems to be a dividing line between men simply expressing their ‘gender
identity’ in public space, which is seen as OK, and men’s behaviour of
masquerading as women in order to gain entry to women’s protected spaces,
toilets, prisons and refuges, or trying to steal women’s opportunities through
entering women’s sports, or winning women’s quotas in politics or women’s
literary prizes, which is not. But the insult of transgenderism does not stop at
practices which have such manifestly harmful effects upon women and children.
The expression of ‘gender identity’, I argue, is insulting in and of itself. The
problem is that men doing womanface are insulting to women when they are
just walking down the street or sitting in a café, activities for which they need
an unwilling audience of women in order to get sexual excitement. But we do
not have language to enable us to express the insult and anger we feel every
time a man pretending to be a woman intrudes himself into our sightlines. I
want to talk today about what kind of language is available to describe the
injury we experience.
Consider men’s roleplaying of ‘gender’ in the workplace. Because the right to
‘gender expression’ is now commonly recognised in workplaces, it is likely that
women have no right to object to their male workmates playing dress up with
stereotypes of womanhood at the next desk. Men doing this insulting behaviour
may be their bosses and women may have to ‘respect’ them in meetings.
Women’s rights go out of the window in such situations. When a man
transitions in the office his female workmates must now refer to him by a
woman’s name and pronoun. They must suppress their feelings. Indeed, there is
no language for their feelings and they are likely to experience inchoate
resentment or anger. Women may even feel that they are the problem if they
cannot accept that Jack is now Daisy. I do not imagine that white men would be
able to play act being Black in the workplace or indulge their identities as
wolves, as those men who are into transspeciesism might like to do. They would
4
not have their rights to play act protected in the same way. It is useful to look at
the language and concepts used to teach people what is wrong with Blackface to
see if this can help to provide a language to describe the injury to women when
men play act at being women.
An article in Vox magazine advising people not to dress up in blackface for
Halloween parties provides some useful language. It says, for instance, ‘Put
down the black and brown face paint. Step away from the bronzer 12 shades
darker than your skin. That is, if you're at all interested in not being a walking
symbol of racism this Halloween’. The language here is useful. We should be
able to say to a man doing womanface, ‘take off the high heeled shoes if you
want to avoid being a walking symbol of sexism’ (Desmond-Harris, 2014).
There is a problem with the word sexism though, because women are seen as
having less than human status compared with men, the term is often treated as a
joke, certainly not taken seriously in the way that the term racism is.
Womanhating or misogyny are stronger words.
The article argues that blackface contributes to cultural prejudice against Black
people rather than being harmless behaviour, ‘We have blackface performances
to thank for some of the cartoonish, dehumanizing tropes that still manage to
make their way into American culture’. We should be able to say this about
drag, for instance, which mocks women for entertainment in the same way as
blackface mocks Black people. We should be able to argue that drag
disseminates poisonous prejudice against women into the culture. But drag is
currently seen as just wonderful fun and is increasing in ubiquity in western
culture. The Vox article quotes an academic, David Leonard, saying, ‘Blackface
is never a neutral form of entertainment, but an incredibly loaded site for the
production of damaging stereotypes...the same stereotypes that undergird
individual and state violence, American racism, and centuries’ worth of
injustice’. The same man says that blackface can serve to support ‘implicit bias
and discriminatory treatment and in areas from law enforcement to
employment’. All of this could be argued against womanface, that it supports
implicit bias and discrimination against women.
We are a long way off being able to make such arguments against the influence
of drag and transvestism on the status of women but that, I argue, is where we
need to get to. The academic in the article talks of blackface causing harm in
terms of ‘eliciting anger, or sadness, or triggering various emotions’ and
describes the behaviour as ‘the chance to mock, dehumanize, and to dismiss the
feelings and demands of others’ and that it ‘perpetuates’ a racist society’. All of
these are good words that women should be able to use to describe our reactions
5
to men in womanface because whether in the supermarket or on stage, their
behaviour dehumanizes us and creates anger and sadness.
He says that those who do not understand what is wrong with blackface should
be asked what is right about it. He says that fans of blackface should ask
themselves, "Why do I derive pleasure from this? What's the investment in
doing it, and what's the investment in defending it?" This is a question that is
not asked of the transvestites that have gained credibility with some feminists
for seeming to support our cause by arguing that men cannot become women. A
number of men have become celebrities for feminists because they publicly
state their opposition to much of current transgender politics. They are often
lauded for that, and for their ability to criticise the most outlandish behaviours
and claims of transvestites from an insider perspective. I will not name names
here but many of you will know exactly who I mean. These men need to be
asked how they dare to continue with this hugely insulting behaviour and they
need to desist and apologise. That would be disappointing to them though
because it would remove the only reason for their celebrity and they would fade
into the woodwork of the male population once more.
The unacceptability of blackface is now well understood in popular culture.
There is even an article in Good Housekeeping magazine, for instance, on why
blackface is wrong, which is also helpful in understanding why womanface is
insulting (Schumer, 2020). It says, ‘But the impact of blackface is no laughing
matter…. the practice depicts Black people as unworthy of human dignity….
It’s not a stretch to say that caricaturing Black people creates a moral
justification for violence, so it should not be taken lightly’. Seeing drag as a
‘moral justification’ for violence, though, is the complete opposite of how it is
celebrated now.
Arguably the version of womanface that is drag, is closer to blackface than the
other main version, transvestism is, in that drag and Blackface are usually
practised as forms of entertainment. Transvestites, on the other hand, roleplay
women for sexual excitement and a part of their fetish is being able to do this in
the company of and in front of women. They may engage in impersonating
women just on weekends or as a more permanent lifestyle choice. There is a
form of blackface, however, which is closer to what is now called expression of
‘gender identity’. A rather small group of white people do roleplay aboriginality
in Australia or Asian or Afro-Caribbean people in the US. This is unusual
behaviour and is as commonly practiced by women as by men, which is in itself
interesting and needs to be analysed in the context of the oppression of women
because whilst for the men it is likely to represent a sexual fetish, for the women
6
the motivation will be different. But this behaviour is usually decisively rejected
and seen as reprehensible as in the case of Rachel Dolezal, a white, female
academic in the US who pretended to be Black even to the extent of establishing
quite a reputation in the discipline of Black Studies. She lost her career and
reputation.
Transracialism, though, in which men impersonate other ethnicities or cultures
for excitement, is usually seen as completely different from transgenderism and
it is interesting to see why that is the case. An article last year in The
Conversation, an academic blog platform, by a Pro Vice Chancellor and an
Equity Projects officer from Edith Cowan University in West Australia sternly
rejects the idea that there is any similarity whatsoever between blackface and
womanface on the grounds that people who transgender have no choice, it is
involuntary, whereas blackface is a choice (Hill and Lane, 2021). This implies
that transgenderism is somehow innate. That is not true of course. Men who
engage in transvestite behaviour have a choice not to do it. They may feel
impelled to do it because they have been much affected by the transvestite
pornography they consume, but that is not the same as having no choice.
The example that the article’s authors use to illustrate their argument that
blackface is entirely different, is the UK influencer Oli London who has come
out as non-binary Korean. London has received considerable criticism,
including from Korean critics, who excoriate him for appropriating their culture.
The concept of ‘appropriation’ is frequently used in the critique of men and
women impersonating ethnicity. It can be equally well used to describe the
insult of men doing womanface, but it is not. Women are not seen as having a
culture. He uses precisely the same language and concepts as men with ‘gender
identities’ do to justify his behaviour. He says he is ‘transitioning from white to
Asian’, for instance, and talks of being born in the wrong body, "It feels so good
to finally come out as a Korean non-binary person after being trapped in the
wrong body and wrong culture my whole life". The idea that you can be trapped
in the wrong culture as well as the wrong body is a new twist. He has had 18
surgeries to shave his jaw and change his eye shape costing $250,000. This
month he announced that he was going to reduce the size of his penis because
the average size of a Korean penis is smaller than his appendage (Chong, 2022).
He wears feminine clothing and identifies as ‘non-binary’ but no appropriation
of womanhood is seen in this fact. He uses They them pronouns so does not
identify as female, just not male.
The academics state that, ‘no you can’t identity as transracial but you can affirm
your gender’. ‘At their core’, they say, ‘London’s words and actions are a prime
7
example of racism, cultural appropriation, and transphobia, enacted from a
perspective of considerable privilege. Trans and gender diverse experiences
don’t equate with someone deciding to change their appearance to be part of a
group whose experiences, community and struggles they can’t fully
understand’. Men, they imply, do fully understand the ‘community and
struggles’ of women. Arguably, being able to understand what it is like to have
the body and experience of the opposite sex might be even more different, so
this is a strange distinction to make.
Despite such vehement rejection by critics of the idea that transracialism and
transgenderism could be seen as similar, there are some who are prepared to
make that argument. Back in 2017 an article was published in the feminist
philosophy journal Hypatia which occasioned huge controversy (Singal, 2017).
Rebecca Tuvel, an assistant professor at a US university, compared the cases of
two persons who pretended to be members of an equality category that was not
their own, Caitlyn Jenner, the athlete who in old age started to impersonate a
woman, and Rachel Dolezal who I mentioned above. Tuvel argues that
‘considerations that support transgenderism extend to transracialism (Tuvel,
2017). Given this parity, since we should accept transgender individuals’
decisions to change sexes, we should also accept transracial individuals’
decisions to change races’. There was a big campaign on social media to get the
journal to retract the article which split the editorial board. The article stayed,
up and Tuvel got a tenured position as an Associate Professor of Philosophy at
Rhodes College in Memphis. But this clearly demonstrates the dangers that face
feminists presently if they wish to make such an argument.
Whereas Jenner and Dolezal do womanface and blackface as lifestyle choices,
some men do blackface just as part of drag queen performances, that is just for
entertainment and as part of their careers. They are routinely condemned for
this, but of course not for their impersonation of women. One who has made a
good career out of blackface is Chuck Knipp, a gay, white male comedian from
Canada (Holthouse, 2007). He has attracted criticism and cancellations of his
performances because of his portrayal of a Black woman in a character called
‘Shirley Q. Liquor’ in a cabaret act for white audiences. Shirley Q. is ‘a welfare
mother with nineteen kids who guzzles malt liquor, drives a Caddy and says in
an “ignunt” Gulf Coast black dialect, “I’m gonna burn me up some chitlins and
put some ketchup on there and aks Jesus to forgive my sins.” Shirley also shops
at “Kmark,” eats “Egg McMuffmans,” visits her “gynechiatrist” and just loves
“homosexicals”’. There have, apparently, even been demonstrations against him
from black, gay and transgender activists, but, none, yet, from feminists because
the mockery of women that is the basis of drag is so normalised that it is
8
invisible. Many forms of mockery of other cultures and ethnicities are acted out
by drag queens and they are controversial, though their impersonation of
women is not. In Australia there are white drag queens who do aboriginal drag
such as the Australian drag queen, Scarlett Adams, a competitor in Drag Race
Down Under in 2021 (Kumar, 2021). Photos came to light showing that he had
performed ‘not only in Blackface, but in a burqa, Aboriginal dress, and more’
but he suffered no penalty. He apologised but pointed out that ‘a lot of the other
queens’ did blackface.
The aboriginal drag queen Felicia Foxx, objected fiercely to Adams’ pretence of
being aboriginal but had no awareness that women might find mockery of their
bodies, culture and personhood objectionable (Kelleher, 2021). Mockery of
women is the foundation of drag, but it is only the admixture of race and
ethnicity that occasions any complaint. All these men have built careers on the
mockery of women but there is no harm to be seen in it because women are not
understood as fully human, not seen as capable of being insulted or offended
against.
It is hard to understand why transracialism and transgenderism, or even
transablism or transpeciesism are understood so differently when they are all
fantasies, and, for the men involved, mainly sexual. There are two possible
explanations. One is that women are seen as so unimportant, having no material
reality, really just a trope, i.e. a figurative or metaphorical use of a word or
expression, so lowly in status, barely human compared with men, that it is of no
account if men just treat women as a figment of their imagination. It may even
be that women have been so conditioned into accepting that they are of less
worth than men that they would consider it ridiculous to suggest that they could
be as worthy of respect as Black men should be. The other is that those who
think there is a difference believe that though many identities are simply unreal
and may be insulting, when men identify as women this does represent
something real, that some essence of gender even if not biology, makes the men
who claim it into some kind of real women. There is a great deal of propaganda
from trans rights and gay organisations, through school programmes and the
medical profession, to suggest that children and adults who claim to be the
opposite sex really do possess some unique qualities that make them different
from the ordinary boys and girls and men and women that they really are. And
many, even gender critical, feminists may really believe this, though I find that
hard to accept, when they exempt men who pretend to be women from the
complete rejection that they would almost certainly extend to transracialists who
are very clearly not possessed of any special qualities at all that make them
different from anyone else except active imaginations.
9
The Concept of Identity
I want to finish by talking about the problematic notion of ‘identity’. The basis
for all the acting out that is done in the name of transracialism, transgenderism,
transableism and transspeciesism is the concept of identity. ‘Identity’ today
mainly means a sexually exciting fantasy in a man’s head. It is a very dangerous
notion politically because it destroys the meaning and use of categories of
oppression in social justice politics, something that took decades in the building
and that many feminists and lesbian feminists took part in. There is a history to
the term. Back in the 1970s some feminists adopted the notion of identity in
relation to what is now called ‘intersectionality’ and then came to be called
‘identity politics’. The Black feminists who promoted the term sought to explain
that a woman could identify as both female and Black and her experience would
be fundamentally affected by being in possession of two oppression identities
which were intertwined. Identity, however, did not mean then what it means
today when it has been emptied of political meaning. Back then, it meant
something like class consciousness i.e. whether a person identified with being
Black or being a woman, which were necessary bases for anti-racist and
feminist political organisation and action. Many who were women or Black or
both might not make a political identification, i.e. recognising how these
identities affected their lives and deciding to take action, but being Black and
being a woman were understood as material categories, based on biology,
history and circumstances. You might not politicise the categories, but whether
you did or not, the categories remained materially real. Now identity means
something quite different, something entirely in the mind and with no
connection with material reality at all. This changeover from ‘identity’ being
seen as applying to something real to meaning a fantasy, took place largely in
the 1990s as part of the move to poststructuralism and queer theory in the
universities. Back in the late 90s at the University of Melbourne where I taught,
I was horrified when my subjects were placed in the category ‘politics of
identity’ which included psychoanalytic politics. No, I said, being a woman is
not an identity. It is biological reality. This was not, of course, understood and I
was just seen as being difficult.
The concept of identity as fantasy won out. Today, as we know, the concept of
gender identity is being written into law and policy. Equality Acts which would
once have applied to the material categories of race, class and disability, have
now been extended to cover projections of the imagination. This is likely to
have an effect on the very concept of equality. If men can claim to be women,
why should not white men pretend to be Black, why should not men with
disability fetishes pretend to have disabilities and demand to be accommodated
10
at the workplace for the wheelchairs or other equipment that they do not need
because in fact they have no physical impairments. The determined
undermining of all that we have built as feminists or other campaigners for
social justice and equality is taking place. If the fantasy in which men pretend to
be women is accepted politically as it is at present, why will the categories of
race and disability survive as material realities rather than just being fantasies.
The work of decades is being dismantled to service the whims of white, able-
bodied men.
Conclusion
Presently we are far from the recognition that transgenderism is an insult to
women. Today our failure to respect men’s fantasies in the form of
‘misgendering’ for instance, can lead to huge penalties. We are in the position
of the peasants who had to tug their forelocks to the Lord of the manor. But we
should not mute the ambition to see women recognised as full human beings.
We must work towards a situation where Good Housekeeping magazine will
have an article excoriating womanface. We have to get there because anything
else means forever accepting that women are inferior.
References
Chong, Charissa (2022, 3 February). A white influencer who spent $250,000 to
resemble a K-pop star said they want to ‘look more Korean’ despite facing
blacklash and death threats. Insider.
https://www.insider.com/oli-london-
korean-trolls-hate-death-threats-surgery-2022-2
Desmond-Harris, Jenee (2014, 29 October). Don't get what's wrong with
blackface? Here's why it's so offensive. Vox
https://www.vox.com/2014/10/29/70895...ace-offensive-
halloween-costume
Hill, Braden and Lane, Stevie (2021, 2 July). No, you can’t identify as
transracial but you can affirm your gender. The Conversation.
https://theconversation.com/no-you-c...l-but-you-can-
affirm-your-gender-163729
Holthouse, David (2007, 31 May). Shirley Q. Liquor. The Most Dangerous
Comedian in America. Rolling Stone.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture...-q-liquor-the-
most-dangerous-comedian-in-america-188700/
Kelleher, Patrick (2021, 28 May). Pink News. Drag Queen Down Under Scarlett
Adams Denies Making Light of Racism Row.
11
https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2021/05/2...scarlet-adams-
felicia-foxx-racism-blackface-instagram/
Kumar, Naveen (2021, 2 June). Drag Race Down Under Brushes Over
Contestant’s Blackface History. Them.
https://www.them.us/story/drag-race-
down-under-brushes-over-scarlet-adams-blackface-history
Schumer, Lizz (2020, 27 July). Don’t Get Why Blackface Is Offensive? Here’s
Why It Is (and Why it Matters). Good Housekeeping.
https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/lif...-blackface-is-
offensive/
Singal, Jessie (2017, 2 May). This is What a Modern-Day Witchhunt Looks
like. New York Magazine.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017...ntroversy.html
Tuvel, Rebecca (2017). In Defence of Transracialism. Hypatia. 32 (2), 263-278.
Originariamente Scritto da mixkey3
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