Don't Ponificate About Women's Safety When You Want To Abolish Women's Spaces

Something you probably don’t know about me is that I love travelling to faraway lands. In fact, I’ve spent much of the past eight years travelling. I’ve been to all seven continents, visited over 60 countries, and have loved pretty much all of them.

And yet, without any shadow of a doubt, Japan is my favourite place on Earth.

In my article, What If Womanhood Were A Country?, I waxed nostalgic about Japan as I compared gender identities to national identities, and gender recognition to the immigration process.

I asked why everybody understands that you can’t simply identify as a different nationality, yet the same basic common sense doesn’t apply to identifying as a woman.

Today’s conversation kicks off with Teed, a regular reader who helped me take the metaphor a little further.

Fifth takes over from there.

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Teed:

It’s a nice analogy, but the problem with it is that womanhood does not have a government, with an immigration and naturalization service. The government has a right to do a lot of things that individual citizens do not have a right to do. Among others, it gets to decide who has a right to live here and who doesn’t. No individual, or group of individuals, has a legal right to say to a Somalian-born person with US citizenship “you’re not a citizen! You have no right to be here!“ The question is, are TERFs the immigration police, or are they a lynch mob?

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Steve QJ:

“but the problem with it is that womanhood does not have a government, with an immigration and naturalization service.”

Actually this isn't true. Or, at least, it wasn't true. There used to be a pretty well established "immigration procedure," that included time spent "living as a woman" (aka: social transition, one or two years I believe), a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria, counselling that wasn't conflated with conversion therapy, and only then, cross sex hormones and legal recognition of your new sex.

Trans people (then referring specifically to transsexuals) went through this procedure, regret was pretty much unheard of, and there was next to zero pushback about trans inclusion in society. "TERF"s, back then, were a tiny fringe group who pretty much everybody agreed was nasty, bigoted and transphobic.

Fast forward to 2022, and trans lobby groups have pretty effectively erased all of these common sense standards. Insisting that all we need to do to tell if a male is a woman on a particular day is ask him. Suddenly, everybody who doesn't embrace this quasi-religious belief is a "TERF."

Now, consider immigration in the traditional sense. What do you think would happen in the US if it became possible to simply "identify" as American? If at passport control, all our hypothetical Somalian-born person had to do is say they "felt" like an American, and they instantly gained all of the rights and privileges of any American citizen? Would the people who asked if this was a good idea be anti-immigration? Or racist? If somebody known to have committed terrorist acts against American was granted citizenship under these new rules, would it be bigoted to object?

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Fifth:

I think you've uncovered a limitation of the immigration metaphor here. By this logic, the ideal "immigration procedure" is that candidates should first live in their new country for 1-2 years illegally before receiving any legal protections.

Your characterization of regressive gatekeeping practices as "common sense" beautifully illustrates a common misconception. I experienced similar gatekeeping practices firsthand when I came out back in 2005. These standards weren't designed or employed to prevent men from figuratively sneaking past immigration to invade women's spaces. In fact there's no evidence that these policies were even intended to benefit cis women. They were designed to ensure that trans people would uphold sexist gender roles post-transition, and in turn protect the medical practitioners from being accused of disrupting patriarchal society. In many early cases, the de-facto primary criteria for approval was simply whether or not the (straight cis male) doctor felt sexually attracted to her.

And there was, in fact, quite a lot of pushback from broader cis society at the time. Trans women were and are often accused of reifying stereotypical femininity, holding back feminism, and "seducing" men (by existing in public and being attractive to them). Anti-trans hate groups pointed to trans women's seemingly universal hyper-femininity to dismiss dismiss us as frivolous caricatures of cis women, when in reality we were institutionally forced to present that way.