Debate between activists as to how best to oppose gender ideology has been particularly vigorous this month. What brought it to a head was the publication of Transsexual Apostate, a book written by Debbie/David Hayton, a male school teacher who has undergone ‘gender reassignment’ surgery, and who has featured prominently in mainstream media. Hayton is feted by some who define themselves as ‘gender critical’ because he is critical of ‘trans rights’ activism, and because, unlike male ‘trans rights’ activists, he doesn’t claim to be a woman. For some time, many feminists have been critical of the way organisations like Woman’s Place UK have given Hayton and other men like him a platform, and erased the women who many of them are married to (so-called trans widows). In the book (I have not read it, though I have read extracts) Hayton’s description of his ‘trans journey’ highlights why his influence has been so problematic. His account of his autogynephylia (being sexually aroused by thinking of himself as a woman) raises many safeguarding issues.
Reviews of the book and interviews with the author by gender critical commentators were mainly supportive, and controversial. What so-called ‘ultras’ objected to was these commentators’ use of female pronouns to describe Hayton, and their apparent disregard of safeguarding concerns that arise when an autogynephile male teacher expects his pupils to treat him as if he were a woman. Supporters of Hayton see themselves as moderates - seeking compromise, recognising nuance, and feeling relaxed about the use of ‘preferred pronouns’. Often, they suggest, there are strategic advantages in going along with preferred pronouns and supporting ‘trans’ celebrities who oppose aspects of ‘gender’ ideology. In particular, these moderates argue, using language that politicians understand enables them to raise issues such as greater self-identification of ‘gender’ and how equality law is interpreted more effectively, And, they argue, this is helped by being able to draw on support from people who identify as ‘trans’.
The debate between ‘ultras’ and ‘moderates’ became heated on X/twitter, as debates there often do. I guess I’m on the ‘ultra’ side, for reasons I’ll go into later. It feels odd, though, to term as ‘ultra’ the use of accurate language to describe a reality that nearly everyone on the planet understood a decade ago, and which most still do - that there are two sexes, and that no human can change from one to the other.
I am aware that on another issue, veganism, my position is more moderate than ultra. Am I being inconsistent, I wonder. And if not, why not?
Vegan absolutism
One of the challenges of admitting to being vegan is the risk of being deemed a hypocrite. I stopped eating and wearing dead flesh five decades ago. I have avoided eggs for four of those decades, and dairy for three of them. My veganism, though, is not absolute - if offered a slice of cake, I will usually accept, without asking to check the ingredients. I will soothe a sore throat with a warm drink of honey and lemon. And I had the first two Covid jabs. I imagine that if I counted the calories I consume over the course of a year, more than 99% of them would be vegan. Does that make me a true vegan? I’m not sure. But I suspect that no urban dweller in today’s society can be 100% vegan, particularly if account is taken of agriculture’s impact on wildlife habitats.
A few years ago I read The Vegetarian Myth, by Lierre Keith (available online here). I disagreed with much of it. But the last section was an eye opener - Keith shows how the monocrop agricultural systems that we rely on to provide our food have destroyed habitats and driven many animal species to extinction.
“What are invisible are all the other animals that agriculture has driven extinct. Entire continents have been skinned alive, yet that act goes unnoticed to vegetarians, despite the scale. How do they not see it? The answer is they don’t know to look for it … . Humans have to draw their sustenance from where they live, without destroying that place.”
Keith’s insight shows that in order to kid ourselves we are totally vegan, we have to ignore the animals that are killed to grow the crops that feed us. Her conclusion that we should return to eating animals doesn’t follow - across most measures, meat and dairy are far more environmentally damaging than plant alternatives. It is hard to imagine too, that drawing ‘sustenance from where we live without destroying that place’ would be feasible without a human population that is drastically reduced from its present size. But Keith’s insight about the animal lives that are lost as a result of crop production does undermine the case for vegan absolutism.
Professor Gary Francione Is an influential advocate for vegan absolutism. He believes regulation to improve animal welfare promotes meat and dairy consumption, and he sees no value in initiatives to encourage people to consume less meat and dairy, like Veganuary and Meatless Monday.
“Tell the chicken who is being tortured in the ‘enriched’ cage promoted by the animal welfare groups that it’s all OK because you’re not eating meat on Meatless Monday.”
Much of his advocacy of Veganism is based on shaming consumers of animal products:
“There are two sorts of environmentalists: those who don’t consume any animal products and those who don’t really care about the environment” (my emphasis)
Becoming a vegan, he insists, is straightforward - “going vegan is as easy as wanting to go vegan.”
The main problem with this approach is that it is counter productive. Cuisine is rooted in culture, and many meat based dishes cannot easily be adapted without recourse to ultra processed meat substitutes, with the likely adverse health consequences of eating any UPF. Resistance to completely changing the meals one is accustomed to is powerful, and there are many psychological barriers to acknowledging the suffering animals endure to provide our food. I wrote, here, about a horrific afternoon I spent working in a vast chicken shed during my time on a kibbutz. Despite reacting viscerally to the experience, I was not deterred from eating an egg at breakfast the next morning. I simply did not connect the appalling suffering I had witnessed with what I was putting in my mouth, and it was many years before I eventually decided to stop eating eggs.
Encouraging consumers to include more plant foods in their diet, and to cut down on animal products, is a lot more palatable for most people than telling them they must exclude animal products completely. For some it will be a first step in a process that eventually ends with becoming vegan, or nearly vegan. If the aim is to save animal lives, and reduce the environmental impact of animal farming, then advocating the measures that are most effective in reducing consumption of animal products must be preferable to shaming meat eaters and provoking their resistance. Saving animals’ lives should surely be more important than feeling virtuous.
What appears to vegan absolutists as binary - eating animals harms the environment/ eating plants doesn’t harm the environment, for example - is in reality more nuanced.
Language, the normalisation of ’gender’, and boundary violation
Sex, on the other hand, is binary, defined for humans in relation to reproductive role. Females produce large gametes (eggs), and males small gametes (sperm). There are no other gamete types. There are nuances. Some individuals within each sex class may be unable to produce the gametes appropriate to their class (because of age or infertility). Some will choose not to use their gametes for reproductive purposes. And a tiny proportion of individuals, who are born with ambiguous sex characteristics, are intersex. None of this contradicts the basic reality that sex is binary.
This binary has, of course, been under sustained attack for some time by a gender industry which seeks out new profit opportunities from creating synthetic sex identities. Blocking children’s puberty, pumping them with cross-sex hormones, and mutilating their genitals doesn’t change their sex, but it does interfere with their reproductive capacity (not totally, because freezing their gametes, to be fertilised and later incubated in a surrogate mother, is yet another profit opportunity for this barbaric industry).
To normalise synthetic sex identities, the gender industry relies on a supportive propaganda network - LGBT charities (given funding to focus on T rather than LGB), universities, media, HR departments, etc. Changing language, to make it seem that it is possible to change sex, is crucial to this normalisation. “Those who have the power to name the world,” wrote the late Dale Spender, “are in a position to influence reality” (Man Made Language, 1980). It’s a power that the gender industry has wielded to great effect.
The term ‘transwoman’ was designed to confuse - many still think it refers to a woman who wants to be seen as a man, rather than a man who wants to be seen as a woman. The confusion was amplified when the term was incorporated into the mantra ‘transwomen are women’, modified later to include a space between ‘trans’ and ‘women’ - ie ‘trans women’, to emphasise that we really are supposed to include these men in the category of women. Actual women were renamed as ‘cis women’ or ‘trans men’, only to be followed recently by a new category of ‘non-trans women’.
The confusion is reinforced by pressure to use ‘preferred pronouns’ to refer to people who want to be seen as a ‘gender’ rather than their sex. These ‘preferred pronouns’ can be pronouns appropriate to the opposite sex, or artificial names associated with an ever-expanding plethora of ‘genders’. We are encouraged to use these preferred pronouns in order to be kind to people who want to dissociate from their sexed body. Whether it is kind to reinforce someone’s dissociation, particularly children’s dissociation, is highly questionable. What is certain, though, is that when we go along with it, we participate in a lie. It’s a lie that is damaging, on many different levels.
People have lost their jobs for not going along with the lie. Recently, a 90-year old volunteer was stopped from continuing her work with the National Multiple Sclerosis Society in the USA, because she queried why pronouns were added to email signatures within the organisation. The organisation explained that this was to “create a safe place that welcomes all”. To follow their “policy of inclusion” they excluded a woman who had given MS sufferers 60 years of service.
Using pronouns that conflict with the reality of sex confuses our brains, and weakens our instinctive assessment of risk. “Pronouns are Rohypnol. They change our perception, lower our defences, make us react differently, alter the reality in front of us.” (Barra Kerr, Pronouns are Rohypnol, 2019). This is a safeguarding risk, particularly for girls - “They need those instincts intact, and sharp.”
Female victims of assault are further traumatised when trial judges instruct them to lie under oath and refer to their male attacker as ‘she’.
Wrong pronouns get us used to the idea that boundary violation is acceptable. The list of possible harms that this could enable is extensive - including the end of single-sex spaces and women’s sport, lowering the age of consent, artificial reproduction, and transgenic and gene edited humans. Machine/human integration and radical life extension are goals shared by many tech billionaires. They are goals whose achievement would threaten humanity itself.
Against compromise
“By employing opposite-sex pronouns and amplifying the voices of individuals with artificially constructed sex characteristics, some of these activists are inadvertently contributing to the legitimisation of the corporately fabricated category of humanity.”
(Jennifer Bilek, Activists and the Artificially Manufactured Sexes of the Gender Industry, Substack 18 Feb 2024)
It is tempting, in any political conflict, to seek a compromise that gives something to each side. The binary nature of sex, and the structural oppression of the sex class of women by the sex class of men, make compromise impossible. Being kind just gives ground, ground that will be taken. Persuading yourself that you don’t believe what you’re saying is not a recipe for clear thought and mental health. And using wrong language when arguing policy with politicians, because that is the language they will understand, results in policy that fudges the key issue. Either sex matters, or it doesn’t - using language that suggests sex doesn’t matter ends up with policies that ignore the importance of sex.
Respecting truth and using accurate language will not, by themselves, halt the onward march of the gender industry. But using language that consistently lies about a person’s sex to challenge that industry can only be minimally effective.
Post script
Gary Francione, the vegan absolutist, is also ’gender critical’. He has contributed to this month’s debate on X as a moderate, arguing on free speech and strategy grounds that pronoun use should be a personal choice, and that men with paraphilia should not be regarded as a safeguarding risk.
Lierre Keith, whose insight into the impact of crop farming on wildlife undermines vegan absolutism, is also the founder of WoLF, the US Women’s Liberation Front. I imagine she would be more on the ultra than the moderate side of the recent UK debate about language and ‘gender’..