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Building a transgender resistance
I was sincerely hoping not to have to write this piece, especially as my research for the last four years has focused on mediation and hospitality of rights. Sophie and Hans Scholl of the White Rose resistance movement in Nazi German serve as my go to example of people putting it all on the line for rights, dying for a cause that was both noble and in the end right. Martin Luther King’s letters from his jail cell show the dire need for everyone to step up, and as the Scholl’s learnt to their cost there are plenty of ordinary people who will happily sell out the resistance if it means an easier life for themselves. Building a transgender resistance needs to be inspired by the Scholls but end up like King’s, building from the grass roots to have mass appeal.
The irony is that gender critical beliefs and values were a fringe movement circa 2012. Pretty much every country was moving in the direction of trans normativity, giving trans people equity with the rest of society. Yet, as a hardcore group of writers such as Julies Burchill and Bindel typify there has always been a strand of radical women’s rights advocate who have desperately hated the idea of trans women in public. Trump’s first term saw the rise in anti-trans insurgency, replacing the anti-gay agenda once Obergefell v Hodges allowed gay marriage. The anti-trans resistance found its opening in political discourse, and societies around the world swung from being trans positive and trans neutral to become increasingly hostile to trans identities. This was wedded to a deeply misogynistic conception of womanhood that rooted “woman” in womb, hearth, and socially ordained dress codes.
It is not hyperbole to say that the anti-trans resistance has entrenched itself as the normative way of seeing sex. Right wing ideology has chipped away at anything gender related, labelling it as an ideology while ignoring the near religious fervour that comes from their own belief system. Their resistance to a pluralistic understanding of self, that people have the right to self-determination and ability to move through the world is both rooted in archaic Catholic dogma and National Socialist values about women’s bodies. Its almost as if the whole anti-trans movement has been astro-turfed by the extreme right to put women back in the kitchen.
