For class, women’s, and trans rights!

Workers’ Liberty supports trans and gender-diverse (TGD) people’s rights. Some left feminists (sex based rights activists or SBRAs) see those as threatening women’s rights. A series of articles has attempted to thread a path for left-wing activists to reach more agreement, and this one summarises.

I am a university and gender-affirming health clinic researcher, who identifies as a gender-non-conforming man (he/they). Nothing I write here represents my employers’ stance.

Trans people’s rights have increasingly been posed as a threat to (cis) women’s rights by sex-based rights activists (SBRAs, who sometimes call themselves “gender critical” feminists. This series (alongside many other Solidarity articles) has aimed to provide solid counter arguments. Articles have examined history, political polarisation, biological and social materiality, toilets, sport and prisons.

Trans people are not a new phenomenon. Records go back thousands of years. There is great variation in social acceptance, coming-of-age rituals, etc., across time and cultures, and what “trans identity” means changes between cultures too. But there have been few societies with just two genders and a rigid “Chinese Wall” between them. Current estimates are that around 0.5% of people identify as trans and 1% as non-binary.

Early 20th century Europe saw serious activism, the start of gender affirming care (hormonal and surgical), and scientific inquiry centred around the socialist Magnus Hirschfeld in Germany. Later science shows Hirschfeld to have made errors, but he and the socialists who campaigned with him did huge work against the idea that lesbian, gay, and trans people were dangerous and to be suppressed by law. That work was smashed by the Nazis.

Since the 1950s there has been a gradual liberalisation of scientific and medical thinking and then “educated opinion”. Gender-affirming medical care has become more available (and safer and easier); and social acceptance of trans people has increased, as for gay, lesbian and bisexual people, but trailing them by around 20 years.

Liberalisation has been less for working-class trans people, who have difficulty affording the medical care and have to look to public venues rather than their own private facilities for social life. The famous trans woman economist Deirdre McCloskey, though a pro-capitalist (anti-Trump) free-marketer herself, notes in her memoir that “working-class gender crossers are routinely abused” by officials and bureaucracies where upper and middle-class ones can escape: “Class matters”.

There have been zig-zags along the way, for example radical-feminist polemic against trans people in the late 1970s. In recent years right-wing forces have focussed on restricting rights for trans people (and LGBTIQ more broadly), especially in Hungary, Russia and the USA. The UK is now caught up in that backlash.

Some left-minded “sex-based rights activists” (SBRAs) agree with some of the attacks by governments and courts on trans rights, arguing that trans rights, or at least trans women’s rights, and beyond a certain point anyway, threaten women’s rights. They oppose trans people being sacked from jobs for being trans, but also oppose allowing trans women in “women’s spaces”, or access to puberty blockers for young trans people.

There is a disconnect in these debates: trans people are not warriors for the ruling class, or sycophants for woke professors, or predators “dressing up” the better to attack cis women. Historically their rights have risen or fallen with general women’s rights. They are an oppressed group that needs support from the working class, in line with Lenin’s idea that the working class needs to be a tribune for all the oppressed. And their demand is very simple: just to be allowed to live as they are, without harassment.

The Cass Report of 2024 has had a hurtful impact on trans people’s lives, especially trans women. The backlash has also hurt masculine-appearing cis women. They are now more likely to be harassed when they use “women’s spaces”.

For many of us it comes to seem “obvious”, from very young, that we are female or male, and difficult to understand how anyone can “cross” from one gender to another.

Trans identity is different from divergence from gender stereotypes. Since the 1960s, gender stereotypes have generally become looser, and divergence from them less censured, but at the same time trans identification has multiplied.

The scientific research is not entirely clear, but studies point towards a complex interaction of biological and social factors in trans identity. Gender identity usually settles by around three years old, and many trans people have felt incongruity with ascribed gender since that age. Others develop a less binary gender identity.

We do not develop gender identity by being “told” we are male or female. Nor do we do it by observing external physical differences between male and female, which at age three are small. Gender identity is not a fiction or fantasy, but (like personal identity more generally) a material part of human development. It usually correlates with sex observed at birth, but for a significant minority, it does not. There is another significant minority for whom sex at birth is unclear or assigned in error.

In the USA, and now even more in the UK, there are pushes to exclude trans women from women’s toilets, prisons, sport, and even conferences and social groups like the Women’s Institute and Girlguiding.

Most trans people try to avoid public toilets or only go to single-cubicle or non-gendered ones. They often avoid change rooms and seek toilet cubicles to have privacy. Australian trans organisations advocate for converting single sex toilets into all-gender ones with single cubicles, and for “labelling what facilities are available … whether the bathroom has toilets, urinals, or change table”.

There is no evidence that trans people using toilets or changing rooms, let alone participating in conferences or social groups, aligned with their gender identity pose an actual danger to cis women.

In a few cases, trans activists have tried to ban SBRA speakers, or to deny SBRA trans-exclusive groups meeting spaces. We are against that. If radical lesbian groups, for example, want cis-only meetings, they should have them. But the bans and exclusions against trans (and intersex and gender-nonconformist) people are a far greater issue.

Some cis women feel uncomfortable sharing spaces with trans women. But trans women face actual danger in using men’s facilities, and face social exclusion or forced “outing” if they are banned from conferences and social groups and from using women’s facilities in workplaces, swimming pools, cinemas, etc. The social cost of “bathroom bans” and of the anti-trans vigilantism that is the only way of enforcing them far outweighs any gain.

There are a few recorded cases of sexual assault by trans women in women’s prisons. Perpetrators of sexual assault are dangerous in prison as they are outside. But trans women represent a very small part of the problem of violence in women’s prisons. The vast bulk is perpetrated by prison guards (often cis-male) and cis women prisoners. Fewer than three per thousand prisoners in England and Wales are trans. Trans prisoners are at much greater risk than cis.

Vastly fewer people, especially whose conviction is not for violence, should be in prison. In England, 70-odd% of women prisoners are for non-violent offences. England jails about three times as many people, in proportion to population, as the Netherlands.

Any resident (cis or trans) in person deserves protection from potential perpetrators. And all inmates should have some choice over whom they share a cell with, or whether they are in a single person cell. But trans women are overwhelmingly more likely to be the victims of violence in prisons than the perpetrators.

Trans people generally have difficulty with access to sport. In school, community, and recreational sports, as distinct from elite sport, the answer is simple: let all trans women and trans girls participate as they wish. A recent Californian high-school contest calmed “cis exclusion” fears by saying that where a trans girl won a gold medal (as one did), a second gold medal would go to the cis runner-up. That brought no complaints from either trans or cis competitors, and maybe could help towards a happy compromise.

Elite sport with financial high stakes raises more complicated issues, which I don’t discuss here, but the record of decades shows that the “cis exclusion” fears are unfounded. Medical gender transition impairs sport performance, and by a comparable amount to the 10% or so advantage of men’s performance over women’s at the top level. Trans women have participated in women’s elite sports for many decades, yet no trans women have won top prizes, let alone the 0.5% or so you would expect from an even field. At Tokyo 2021 New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard was the only known trans woman to reach the Olympics, and she had little success.

Being trans is not a mental illness or an expression of predatory impulses. Rather, it is a less common alignment of gender identity with a particularly sexed body. Trans people have been around, in different ways, for all human history and across all cultures. We should support the extension and reinstatement of the greater acceptance they have found in many countries since the 1970s and 1980s, and especially for working-class trans people, who suffer worst from discrimination.