Abstract
Picking up on Janice Raymond’s infamous work The Transsexual Empire (1979), Sheila Jeffreys’ monograph Gender Hurts aims to provide a critical analysis of ‘transgenderism’ as a contemporary medical/political phenomenon. Her book is a reaction to what she envisions to be ‘an avalanche’ of celebratory works on the subject within feminist academia. She suggests that there is a gap in critical feminist academic literature that does not fit with the wealth of contemporary critiques generated by radical feminists on the web (pp. 11–12). Jeffreys’ book fits into a broader tradition of radical lesbian feminist works that seek to abolish ‘the idea of gender as the foundation of the political system of male domination’, rather than to celebrate it as an affirmative component of feminist identity politics, or to take it as a starting point for affirmative transgender discourse(s) (p. 1).
After outlining this position in the introduction, Jeffreys makes a comparison between the social construction of transgenderism and the construction of ‘the homosexual’, arguing both constructions function to normalize ‘unacceptable gender behaviour which might threaten systems of male dominance and female subordination’ (p. 17). Extending this argument in the second chapter (‘Transgenderism and feminism’), she argues that transgenderism is fundamentally opposed to the feminist project, which ought to have female-born subjects and their lived experiences of subordination as females at the heart of its politics (p. 36). In addition, she articulates a stark opposition between radical lesbian feminism on the one hand, and queer theory and politics on the other: the first tries to abolish gender, and then latter tries to mobilize it as a site of personal and political empowerment (p. 43). The general argument established here is that transgenderism as a medical and political phenomenon is based upon a notion of essential, innate gender identity, thereby appropriating and affirming the very mechanism that continues to subordinate those female-born subjects that should be the subjects proper to feminist discourse, according to Jeffreys (pp. 1, 14). In the third chapter (‘Doing transgender: Really hurting’) Jeffreys touches upon various medical facets of transgender healthcare, arguing that ‘physically changing the bodies of men and women who seek to transgender is ineffective in improving physical and mental health and social functioning’ (p. 79), and is, in fact, mentally and physically damaging. Moving away from the question of how transgenderism as a discourse might hurt transgender people themselves, Chapter 4 (‘A gravy stain on the table: Women in the lives of men who transgender’) is concerned with the ways in which male-to-female (MTF) transitions might be hurtful to non-transgender women occupying the direct environment of such ‘male-bodied transgenders’, as Jeffreys describes them. In the subsequent chapter (‘Women who transgender: An antidote to feminism?’) she elaborates on this theme, this time focusing on the way female-to-male (FTM) transitions might harm the lesbian partners of ‘female-bodied transgenders’ by forcing them to be ‘straightened out’ (p. 117), thereby simultaneously weakening lesbian communities as an important part of feminist discourse. Picking up on the argument established in Chapter 1 (i.e. transgenderism serves to control and erase gender inappropriate behaviour without naming it as such, ‘The construction of transgenderism’), Chapter 6 (‘Gender eugenics: The transgendering of children’) focuses on transgender healthcare for young children, positioning it as a harmful form of ‘gender eugenics’. In Chapter 7 (‘A clash of rights: When transgender is inscribed in the law’) Jeffreys argues that the legislation of transgender rights exemplifies the ways in which governments continue to support and enact the subordination of (female-born) women. She mainly bases this argument on her previously established argument that male-to-female transgenderism in particular is harmful to women and the feminist project in its appropriation and affirmation of an essential ‘feminine gender’ (p. 161). In the final chapter (‘Women’s space and the transgender challenge’) Jeffreys carries this argument further by seeking to demonstrate how male-to-female transgendered subjects invade women only spaces, thereby violating those rights feminist have historically striven for. In the conclusion (‘Conclusion: The abolition of gender’) Jeffreys comes back to the main claim she tries to establish throughout the book, namely that transgenderism as a socially constructed phenomenon is harmful to (female-born) women and works through the affirmation of gender stereotypes that need to be abolished altogether (pp. 187–188).
This work is at best remarkable and at worst offensive is its outward refusal to affirm transgendered people’s self-identifications. In the introduction Jeffreys states that ‘sex’ is an absolutely unalterable bodily characteristic that can by no means be altered by hormones or surgery. In order to avoid ‘the mistaken impression that sex can be changed’ (p. 8), as she states, she finds it necessary consciously to bypass sexed and gendered self-identifications, referring to MTF transgender women as ‘transgender men or male-bodied transgenders’ and to FTM transgender men as ‘transgender women or female-bodied transgenders’ while using pronouns accordingly. Apart from the possibility that such denial of people’s self-representation and felt sense of self might be considered outwardly insulting, it also itself demonstrates biological essentialism: the notion of ‘sex’ here becomes an absolute knowable fact that floats above cultural and social specificity, and even exceeds genital appearance and/or certain bodily functions (that can indeed be changed by hormone therapy and surgical body modification).
The presence of this biological essentialist component in Jeffreys’ argument becomes particularly problematic in the light of the epistemological framework she outlines as enabling her core argument. What she proposes to follow is a radical kind of social constructivism, in which she positions both ‘gender’ and ‘transgender’ as socially constructed devices meant to subordinate female-born subjects, in which the latter category then appears to be curiously essentialized. This methodologically fraught combination of biological essentialist and social constructivist epistemological standpoints taken together enables Jeffreys to erase transgender identity politics as a valuable component of feminist discourses.
The erasure of people’s self-identifications and representations as meaningful and meaning-generating forces indeed stretches itself further into the realms of methodological contradiction when it comes to the ways Jeffreys chooses to present and interpret her research material: her disquisition on how MTF transitions might be harmful to female-born women is mainly based on fragments taken from interviews with the partners of MTF transgender persons. These interviews were in fact part of a different project carried out by the American psychologist Virginia Erhardt (2007) that was aimed at demonstrating how these women supported their transitioning partners. As Jeffreys herself notes, the material she uses to support her claim was ‘not intended to be critical of the practice’, but simply proved ‘useful’ for her case (p. 12; see also p. 83). One might argue that the intentional bypassing of research participants’ self-positioning demonstrates a particular un-feminist mode of doing research.
The aforementioned critiques notwithstanding, Jeffreys’ work is based on a set of engaging research questions of great contemporary interest: ‘[h]ow … did the category “transgender” get created and what are the implications of its construction?’ (Valentine, 2007, as paraphrased by Jeffreys, p. 34), and how can the idea of innate gender identity that is so important to transgender healthcare be negotiated in the light of a social constructivist feminist paradigm? The book in itself, however, ultimately does not provide a satisfying answer to these questions because it does not engage with ‘transgenderism’ as a phenomenon beyond its own claims. Moreover, the final suggestion made in the conclusion seems highly unsatisfactory: when gender as well as the physical stereotypes that it advocates is abolished, ‘men’ will no longer feel the need to fetishize women’s subordination by wanting to become them, and ‘women’ will no longer be urged to aspire at being men (pp. 187–188). The literal obligation to realize a future of ‘flat shoes and trousers’ for (female-born) women in order to extinguish gender and transgenderism does not do justice to years of deep social constructivist feminist engagement, nor to the research questions posed.
Offering some severely offensive representations of transgender persons and medical transitions, it must be noted this book is outwardly unsuitable as an introduction to transgender discourses, whether academic, political or medical. In its study of transgender phenomena devoid of any engagement with the embodied experiences of transgender subjects themselves, it also cannot be seen as a contribution to contemporary ‘transgender studies’ (Stryker, 2006, p. 12). Moreover, it does not do justice to the broader political and academic involvement of radical feminisms as a whole. A productive reading of Jeffreys’ book thus requires a strong inter-textual approach as well as clear reading goals: standing on its own, the text provides neither a satisfying answer to its own research questions nor a thorough and honest exploration of its research subjects. For this one might better return to the work of, for example, David Valentine, whose research questions appear in Jeffreys’ book. Jeffreys’ work then, can (and must) be taken as interesting and potentially painful study material for the questions surrounding the delicate and sometimes hurtful position transgender identity and embodiment occupy within feminist theory and academia today. Gender Hurts hurts.