What Human Rights Don't Trans People Have?

One of the downsides of sharing your opinions online is the nagging worry that you’re wrong about something important. 

What if dogs and knitting really can be racist? What if silence really is violence? And what if, despite all my conversations and research on trans issues, I’ve managed to miss the genocidal human rights violations that activists insist are taking place?

Trans rights are human rights. I’m not sure even the most committed TERF disputes that. But human rights, as the name implies, already apply to all humans. So what human rights don’t trans people have? 

A few days ago on Twitter, in response to another user, Laís was kind enough to offer an answer. But were these really human rights he was talking about?

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Laís:

Here is quick list: https://katymontgomerie.medium.com/what-rights-dont-trans-people-have-228c728f564a… And always remember kids, Google is your friend!

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Steve QJ:

Link is broken. But also, not looking for a list of human rights violations around the world, or obviously women, gay people and people of various ethnicities could claim they lack rights. The question was directed at an individual living, presumably, in the U.K. or U.S.

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Laís:

Link isn't broken, but you can still use google. They are in the list, just CTRL+F 'United States' or 'United Kingdom' and you gonna find it.

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Steve QJ:

Yeah, sorry, Twitter was broken, not the link. As the OP is in Scotland, I dutifully went through all the "missing rights" for the U.K.. 2 of 6 relate to marriage and are genuine issues (one affects gay people too). I'd never heard of the spousal veto before. But, and this is the key point, none of the rest are “human rights.” They're trans privileges.

Trans people want to be the only people who get to make a mental health self-diagnosis that professionals and the law can't question. No other human has this right. And they want healthcare based on that inviolable diagnosis.

Now don't get me wrong, I totally support the provision of gender affirming care for trans people. But it's not a human rights infringement for doctors to actually diagnose dysphoria before prescribing hormones and chopping off body parts.

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Laís:

You think that having your gender recognized without requiring surgery is a privilege? So you acknowledge it's a privilege cis people have? You realize you never had to prove anyone you're a man, and you're recognized as such by 99,9% of the time?

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“You realize you never had to prove anyone you're a man, and you're recognized as such by 99,9% of the time?”

Keep this line in mind for later. Note that I hadn’t told Laís that I’m a man. Yet somehow, just by looking at my profile picture, he managed to figure it out…

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Steve QJ:

Ah, there’s the rub. I don’t have my “gender” recognised. I have no gender identity. I *am* a man, and people treat me as such without giving the slightest thought to what might be going on in my head. This is how “cis” people live.

Trans people want us to ignore what they are and act solely based on what they say they feel in their heads.

I don’t begrudge that. I believe gender dysphoria is real. I also believe some people have lied to access women’s spaces. Unquestioningly taking men’s word at the legal level carries obvious risks for women.

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“I don’t have my “gender” recognised.”

We don’t talk about this point enough. 

As far as I can tell, “gender identity” is a symptom of gender dysphoria (or of confusion from being told from an early age that adherence to gendered stereotypes makes you a boy or a girl). 

I’m not sure where my gender would fall if I asked one of the ideologues (according to this website everybody is transgender), but there are lots of masculine stereotypes that don’t apply to me and plenty of feminine stereotypes that do. Once upon a time, we just called this a personality. 

I’ve never spoken to a single person, trans or otherwise, who could tell me how it felt to be a man or a woman. Yet laws are being written and children are being sterilised based entirely on the faith that this feeling exists and is more meaningful than our biology.

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Laís:

"I have no gender identity".

You just told me you're man, see?

Look, I acknowledge predators can be a problem I agree there must have protocols in gendered spaces to protect women We could require therapy, transition and changing documents... But not surgeries, some people don't need or can't have surgery.

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Steve QJ:

Haha, yes, and I use the word in the same way that 99% of the human race has always used it; to describe the objective biological reality that I’m an adult human male. It doesn’t say anything about which masculine or feminine stereotypes I conform to or how I feel inside.

If you recognise the need for sensible protocols then we’re in agreement. But then we must also agree that asking trans people to abide by those protocols is not an infringement of their human rights. It’s a reasonable safeguard to protect women’s right to privacy and safety.

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Laís:

I already agree it's not a violation if we require transition to access gendered spaces. I think its a violation if we require a "mental health diagnosis" for people to start transition.

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Steve QJ:

A man comes to you and says, "despite what you and everybody else sees, I'm a woman. Unless you invert my penis and put me on cross sex hormones for the rest of my life, I'm going to kill myself." You don't think a mental health diagnosis is justified before you start chopping?

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Laís:

People in the past didn't have a concept of chromossomes or even biological sex. Gay men were thought as, at least at some level, women. Even today, people don't check your penis or your chromossomes. You pass as a man and it works perfectly fine.

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Steve QJ;

This is such revisionist nonsense. The only people who "thought of gay men as women" were homophobes. Yes, people in the past didn't know about chromosomes. Yet they could still tell men from women. You knew I was a man from a picture of my face. Tell me, by what magic did you do that without "checking my penis"?

Even cultures that were millennia ahead of us in recognising gender diversity never pretended not to know what a man or a woman is.

Every conversation about this issue ends up with people pretending the only way they can tell men from women is to check their genitals. Or that any man who isn't a model of cis-het-normativity is "at some level a woman". It's so regressive and homophobic and stupid. So if we've reached the intellectual dishonesty portion of this conversation I'll check out now.

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Laís:

Intellectual dishonesty? What do you mean? Looks like you didn't understand a thing I said, because you seem to be confusing the words male and man. Everybody can see you're male, and thats it, nobody questions you're a man.

But a fully transitioned trans man that looks just as you, still gets stupid people to debate whether they are really a man, and whether he get access to male spaces. Same goes for trans women.

Anyways, what you need to get is trans people acknowledge sex. Nobody here wants you to pretend sex doesn't exist. The problem is: sex can be wrong in intersex and trans people. Acknowledging that and allowing people to fix it is the whole point.

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Steve QJ:

Yep, if by some miracle you’re not blocked, go look at @IndiaWilloughby’s bio. Note, “female,” not woman, female. I’ve seen many other examples of this.

I’m crystal clear on the meaning of man and male. I’m even clear on how you guys have tried to redefine the word “man” to divorce it from sex.

The problem is, it means you can’t say in any meaningful way what a man is. If man/woman are just identities, just feelings divorced from any biological reality, then you already told on yourself by calling me a man earlier without checking. How could you see my gender???

But actually, you raise an important point here. You say it's stupid for a fully transitioned trans man, who looks like me, to be denied access to male spaces. I agree. But then a) are you saying that TWAW and TMAM [editor’s note: Trans Women Are Women and Trans Men Are Men] only when they pass?

And b) do you think trans men should have to go to male prisons if they commit crimes? Even though they still have vaginas in almost all cases? Because they'll be at much greater risk of rape than trans women most of the time. Which is why they almost always go to female prisons.

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A few years ago, I read a (sadly now-deleted) Twitter thread about a woman and her neighbour, Gene. During a conversation about whatever political issue was stirring up outrage that day, Gene claimed that Obama was born in Kenya:

So I dead-eyed Gene and said, “You don’t really believe that. I know you don’t.”

I will never forget the look that crossed his face. Because it was familiar. It was the same shit-eating grin my racist stepfather used to wear when spouting Rush Limbaugh dittohead shit at the dinner table. It was the same wink-wink-nudge-nudge all the fucking white supremacists and Satanic Panic assholes give.

Gene absolutely, positively did not believe that Obama was born in Kenya. But he would continue to say he believed it, no matter who asked, to the end of his life.

Laís didn’t answer my questions. Because admitting that he could tell I’m a man just by taking a cursory glance at my profile picture, would bring the whole house of cards crashing down. 

So even though he absolutely, positively does not believe that you need to check somebody’s chromosomes (or in most cases their genitals) to tell what sex they are, he’ll claim to believe it, no matter who asks, until it's no longer fashionable to do so.

And the most frustrating thing is, this lie keeps us arguing about objective reality instead of discussing compassionate, practical ways to accommodate trans people in our heavily gendered society. 

Because, as I said, Laís makes an important point. Trans men often make convincing enough men that they’d be just as unwelcome in female spaces as I am. And some trans women make convincing enough women that they already use some female spaces without anybody noticing. 

There isn’t an absolutist or one-size-fits-all solution that will solve this problem. There probably isn’t a compromise that will make everybody completely happy. But the sooner we stop pretending that common sense is a violation of anybody’s human rights, the sooner we can focus on finding solutions that don’t miss anything important.