Julie Bindel, a popular feminist campaigner in the UK, and Melanie Newman, a journalist trained in the law, wrote about “Trans rights” for the Critic in April. The sub-title of their article reads: “Women’s rights were not considered in legislation that allows trans people to decide their own gender effectively.”
One might ask: If we are going to allow for the premise of “trans people” as individuals who adopt a performative ideology of disembodiment and are granted legal status based on performing body disassociation, why even think that women’s rights WOULD be considered? The idea of “gender identity” rests on the dissolution of the boundary between males and females.
It is patently absurd to” (a) purport to fight the state’s attempts to deconstruct human sexual dimorphism in law and language; (b) discuss “transgender people” as a settled subcategory of humans, and then (c) be surprised that women’s sex-based rights won’t be upheld. If society accepts the notion of disembodiment, which Bindel does, of course, women’s sex-based rights will be obliterated. Women are half of the sexually dimorphic species of humans.
It matters that feminists get this wrong because they have been at the forefront of fighting gender ideology since men in dresses began claiming womanhood. Feminists are setting a precedent for others who are resisting this dissociative ideology.
Bindel’s article frames a war surrounding the violation of biological reality, as a fight between feminists and trans rights activists over conflicting rights. The paper introduces the establishment of the Yogyakarta Principles (YP) – a human rights guideline created in the early 2000s and since amended to include “gender identity,” a euphemism for body dissociation. The YPs are not law; they are guidelines created and pushed by LGBT orgs as they interface with corporations, big Pharma, big tech, and global human rights organizations such as the UN. The guidelines are used to drive the concepts of “gender identity” and “transgenderism” worldwide, to drive the legal and cultural deconstruction of sexual dimorphism. In Bindel’s article, one of the signatories of the YP amendments discusses the blind spot he and others had about the rights of so-called “transgender people” as they impinged on women’s sex-based rights. However, neither Bindel nor the quoted signatory defines “transgender” an incoherent, nonsensical term manifesting chaos and confusion.
Bindel’s article starts by discussing the changes in the UK that allow for body dissociation to be legally acknowledged without medical intervention: “In 2004, with the passing of the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) the UK became the first country in the world to legally recognize trans people as the opposite sex without medical treatment. The Act passed without controversy and with little media coverage. The law was framed thus: a transsexual person (the terminology used at the time by legislators and most trans people) must acquire a gender recognition certificate from a new gender recognition panel made up of lawyers and doctors.”
Bindel appears to think that harms to women’s rights emerge simply from allowing for a legal acknowledgment of so-called “sex change” with no medical intervention. She is wrong. Harms to women’s rights is a perfectly natural and organic outgrowth of enshrining a lie about sex in the law. She is not alone in her error. Many other feminists continually make this mistake, manifesting a newly minted construct of “true trans,” i.e., men who’ve had medical interventions to support the delusion of changing sex, who then purport to understand that this is their own personal illusion (or delusion for some). But the deception is not personal when legally instituted and then marketed as another way to be human.
Interviewing a fellow feminist and academic philosopher, Kathleen Stock, Bindel seems sympathetic to Stock’s suggestion that disembodiment is an acceptable sexual proclivity and that providing this paraphilia legal status and legitimacy is not a problem. The problem, says Stock, is how this paraphilia is shamed. She believes more discussions about the paraphilia, from which the term “transgenderism” has emerged, would be helpful. “If we could discuss autogynephilia in a less toxic way,” says Stock, “fewer men would feel they had to transition.” How Stock makes this assessment is beyond comprehension. “Transsexualism,” under its corporate rebranding to “transgenderism,” has never been so visible, celebrated, talked about, catered to, and driven, by marketing, the media, in Hollywood, at the corporate level, big banks, and medical institutions, than now. The exponential rise of surgeries to dismember people is off the charts.
It is a given for Bindel that people who want to alter their bodies to perform the opposite sex should be respected and legally validated in the material lie of body dissociation, as long as their rights don’t override those of women. But how could women's rights remain intact if we allow for the physical violation of the boundary between male and female as a human rights premise?
People’s rights are not the most important thing at stake here. The concept of “transsexualism,” as a human right and not a disorder, completely upends society, creating dangerous instability. People want to be kind to others with a condition, but this “disorder” has quickly morphed into being framed as a third sex or existing instead as some middle ground of sex between male and female.
The war being framed as a war between “trans people” and feminists is a war for upholding biological reality against the institutionalization of a lie. Feminists claiming to fight for women’s sex-based rights cannot then enforce the legal validation of people who perform disembodiment. The minute you allow for disembodiment as a legal identity is the moment you give up your sex-based rights as half of the sexually dimorphic human species.
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