Far from everything about 'trans'

Confession time - my naive book review from 2018

When submitting my recent review of Jennifer Bilek’s book Transsexual Transgender Transhuman to Amazon UK I discovered that six years ago I had reviewed a book there with a very different take on gender ideology. It’s a review I’d forgotten I had written.

Rereading this 2018 review I’m struck by how much it reveals a lack of understanding about a cult that claims to be just another human rights campaign, but attacks women’s rights, gay rights, and children’s rights. I think it’s worth resurrecting, because how I responded to the book illustrates how easy it is to get manipulated by the cult and its claims to be ‘progressive’. It also demonstrates why denying reality and using inaccurate language about sex to be kind is such a trap.

The book’s title is Everything you ever wanted to know about Trans (but were afraid to ask), and the author is Brynn (Bryan) Tannehill. It’s only now that I realise that the title is a reference to David Reuben’s notoriously misogynistic and homophobic (but kind to transvestites) 1960s sex manual, Everything you always wanted to know about sex, but were afraid to ask. Or possibly to the misogynistic Woody Allen film of the same name.

My review started to go downhill right from the first sentence. I had borrowed the book because my library had displayed it prominently, and recommended it. I didn’t question why the library had done this, as, indeed, had my local bookshop. (I learnt years later that there is a ‘trans’ activist group in the UK dedicated to ensuring that supportive books are prominently displayed and recommended in libraries and bookshops, and that critical ones are either not stocked or hidden from view).

I must have absorbed the ‘trans rights are human rights’ message, and thought that what we needed was a fair balance between ‘trans’ rights and the rights of women, gays, and children. I can’t have realised that men being able to access women-only spaces is not a human right, but a violation of boundaries and an assault on women’s rights. Or that using drugs to stop children, many of them same-sex attracted,  from going through the key developmental stage of puberty is a brutal assault on their bodies and their right to a healthy adulthood.  I must have imagined, too, that a ‘trans’ activist perspective might provide what I termed a “balanced assessment”, of how to reconcile the irreconcilable.

How naive! Maybe I thought i needed to frame my review that way in order for it to be accepted. But maybe I believed that compromise was the way forward. I had not come across Jennifer Bilek’s research then, and had not realised  that ‘trans’ was a marketing project for the medical industrial complex, and that the ultimate objective was a tech infused, transhumanist commodification of our sexed body parts.

I notice, too, that I kept referring to ‘trans’ without the quote marks, as if it was based in reality. And to the author as she, as if that was the appropriate pronoun for a man. I probably assumed that by using his preferred pronouns I was being respectful, without realising that by ‘respecting’ his language I was disrespecting women, and the truth. I can’t believe I thought ‘trans’ activism in the UK “sometimes seemed to be acting as if it was branch of the men’s rights movement”. Sometimes? Seemed? As if? I must have distrusted my perception, and avoided seeing that the gender cult is not only a men’s rights movement, but one that is particularly misogynist and violent. My reference to the danger of opportunist predators self-identifying as ‘trans’ suggests not only that I thought that ‘trans’ was a genuine category of people who are ‘born in the wrong body’, but that I had not understood that men violating women’s boundaries were inherently predatory.

Here’s the review:

Far from everything I wanted to know

I borrowed this book from my local library because of its title, and because the author is described on the cover as “a leading trans activist.”. There are a number of things I wanted to learn about trans activism. I was especially interested to read an American perspective on what has become a contentious issue in the UK - how to balance trans rights and the rights of other groups in society, particularly women and children. But reading Brynn Tannehill’s book has left me none the wiser.

Trans activism in the UK has sometimes seemed to be acting as if it were a branch of the men’s rights movement, with little regard for the safety of women and children. Trans activists have lobbied hard to persuade organisations with safeguarding responsibilities (including local authorities, prisons, schools, and refuges) that biological sex is irrelevant, and that if they self-identify as women they should be allowed full access to female dormitories, changing rooms, etc. They have gone on to argue that anyone self-identifying as trans should be able to erase all references to their biological sex, and to any convictions for offences like rape that can only be committed by men. Concerns that this allows opportunist predators to self-identify as trans women in order to gain access to vulnerable women and children have been dismissed as ‘transphobic hate speech’, and meetings to discuss these concerns have been disrupted. Academics who research the relationship between trans rights and women’s rights have been threatened with rape, and debate around these concerns on social media has been closed down. #nodebate has become the UK trans activists’ hashtag of choice.

Brynn Tannehill’s book alludes to some of these concerns, as expressed in the US, but only to dismiss them as of no consequence. She rejects the evidence that sexual predators take advantage of access to unisex facilities as “groundless fearmongering”, and ignores women’s very real concerns that allowing men to self-identify as women will increase the risk of sexual assault. Attempts to retain same-sex facilities , she insists, are expressions of hatred of transgender people by Trump-supporting churchgoers, and nothing to do with public safety.. She supports the rights of prisoners to transition, and expresses concern about the safety of transgender people in prison. But she totally ignores the threat that male-bodied prisoners who have self-identified as trans can and do pose to their female fellow inmates. And, in all the 431 pages of the book, not a single mention is made of the violence and intimidation which trans activists regularly mete out to anyone, particularly women, who challenges their ideology.

One of the reviews remarks that this book is overly US-oriented. Is trans activism any less self-centred and patriarchal over there? On the evidence of this book, I doubt it. Obviously the political framework is different, but the dogmatism about gender identity, the denial of the importance of biological sex, the dismissal of safety concerns, the distortion of evidence, and the co-opting of the language of liberation are all very familiar. The book claims to provide Everything you wanted to know about Trans. Everything a trans activist wants you to know, perhaps. But certainly not the balanced assessment that the title suggest, and which I was hoping for.

(Amazon UK, 6 December 2018)

I see from Tannehill’s website that he combines ‘trans’ activism with a job as a technical analyst with the RAND corporation, and that he dismisses critics of the ‘trans’ cult as JK Rowling’s “coterie of neo-fascist adjacent sycophants.” 

Rubbishing critics rather than addressing their criticism is a familiar ‘trans’ activist tactic. Needless to say, Tannehill’s male pattern personalised denigration bears no relation to reality.