Defining rights and trans personhood

I have never been attacked in person because I am a trans person, the worst I have suffered is occasional mis-gendering and the odd slur back in the early days. I have the privilege to sit back and enjoy being a woman in society at large, relatively free from the slings and arrows of transphobia. Yet, is this the right place for me to be? Some argue that the dolce vida, the good life, should be the primary aim in life, that all rights should coalesce to provide the maximum happiness to the maximum number of people, even if invariably some small part of the population remains ever attempting to get there. This is the question I asked myself in the first year of my PhD, what exactly do I want to research and what impact do I want to have on the world as an academic. I could have chosen, within reason, virtually any topic, yet I decided to research how trans rights are perceived in the UK. Why? Because I decided I could no longer sit back with my personal privilege and let others fight for my personal rights.

This could be white knight saviour complex, yes, but few trans women have the opportunity to do a PhD, fewer still get paid to do it, and fewer yet get a blank slate to explore these issues from an interdisciplinary perspective. My personal rights are rarely infringed, yet every day trans folk globally are abused, beaten, and slaughtered simply for living their best lives. In Britian thankfully the murder rate is low, yet the UK Government and media have a constant drum beat of anti-trans rhetoric, othering us and putting us into a separate but equal box. Martin Niemöller’s first they came speech always comes to mind:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.

Just because I am white, middle class, and university educated does not mean I will end up spared if trans rights are restricted. First they came for the radical trans folk, then the sex workers, then the ones who could not afford surgery, and then anyone who supports trans rights, cis or trans. It is a spiral of transphobia that will not stop simply because I ignore it.

This is why defining rights, and fighting for those rights is so important. I agree with Hannah Arendt’s proclamation that the right to have rights is the fundamental right, which as she discussed in Chapter 9 of Origins of Totalitarianism is the base right to citizenship of a nation state. Without State protection a person is at the mercy of the mob, their rights contingent on the kindness of strangers. So, if the State itself is responsible for the abnegation of a person’s rights then this must be resisted. Rights are more than human rights or those rights enshrined in law, they are the precepts that exist between us, the inherent rights we build within communities that are codified in common everyday interactions without recourse to the law as an abstraction.

While the law can protect, or abnegate, rights, the everyday practice of rights transcends what those laws say. If a person hurls an insult denigrating another person this infringes the other person’s rights, yet unless the law states this is a crime the insulter is free to do as they wish. Rights are infringed, yet the law remains silent. Our right to personhood, our very right to exist as human beings, depends wholly on the inherent rights we build between us and within society, and then in turn how we go about enforcing those rights.

Trans personhood is complex because no two trans people are the same. Each trans person comes to their innate sense of personal gender identity in different ways, which makes encapsulating what it is to be trans like trying to sift sands on the shore. It slips through your fingers, with only the merest grains grasped in your palm. For me being a woman with a trans history is just one of those things, for others like Travis Alabanza it is none of traditional boundings of gender identity. For others it is a radical conception of self, yet others simply an assimilation into another gender paradigm. And this is what makes trans personhood both so vibrant and so complex.

First they came for the radicals because the radicals beat the biggest drum against oppression. Then they came for the sex workers because they wanted to gentrify the streets and they were easy targets. Then they came for those who dared to dream of being in heterosexual marriages once they transitioned, for a man will forever be a man in the eyes of the law. It goes on. Niemöller’s great gift to history is the foresight to stop the slide, to step in and see the fight is universal, not an atomised one where we have no skin in the game. Rights are defined by those who we uplift and protect, not just by the castles we erect around ourselves.

I am as assimilated as much as it is possible for a trans woman in the UK. I pass through society as the woman I am, yet they will come for me if the attack on rights continues. Standing up for rights is not just about doing the right thing, it is about having the moral courage to understand that even when you have privilege if others lack that privilege you need to take a stand. Trans personhood may be messy and confusing, and I may personally have distaste for this or that, but fundamentally everyone has the right of bodily autonomy, the right to express themselves in the form they wish.

Yet, there is also an intersection of rights that must be considered. Intersectional feminism argues that we need to see the whole person, not just one axis of identity. Women’s rights advocates argue that trans women are inherently men because they were always be men and are therefore will carry patriarchal privilege in invading women’s spaces. This invasion narrative fundamentally ignores the logical flaw of single axis narratives: no two people have the same level of privilege or oppression, and that both shift depending on the context we find ourselves in. No person has a fixed level of oppression throughout their lives, and as such cis women and trans women are in the same ship, not a ship rammed by trans activists like some Viking hoard.

Feminism is a large enough tent to encompass many views and perspectives, each a prism for deconstructing patriarchy. Before you can deconstruct patriarchy you first must buttress and reinforce the basis right to have rights, to acknowledge that rights are not a cake which we slice up, but that tent we all sit under. Rights are always in a tussle with each other, rubbing up against other people’s values and conception of the world, and that is why inherent rights are communal, not a universal construct. To smash patriarchy it takes the whole tent to stand in the trenches, not simply ejecting and excluding certain voices because we do not think they are woman enough.

I came back to the fight for trans rights because it is morally the right thing for me to do with the opportunities I have been given. No-one is forcing me to do this, my supervisors have not held a gun to my head and told me to explore trans rights. I do this of my own free volition because in some small way I hope I can make a difference. First they might have come for some trans folk, but today I hold the line, attempting to stop them coming for anyone else. I am speaking out, and I speak for all women, cis and trans.