The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes by Zoe Playdon, Bloomsbury Publishing 2021
Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality by Helen Joyce, OneWorld 2021
Doublethink: a feminist challenge to transgenderism by Janice G. Raymond, Spinifex Press 2021
When I was at university, an aeon ago, I wrote about Shakespeare’s trousered heroines: Portia, Imogen, Viola. What I marvelled at, then and now, was the prescience of Shakespeare’s perception of how gender stereotypes limit and oppress women. The heroines would enter a male-dominated society dressed as men, sort out the play’s problems and return to their women’s clothing and lives — job done. Clothes didn’t make them actual men — they donned temporary protective identities because women had little agency or freedom. By contrast, Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew chose to fight the unfairness of her life as stereotyped woman and it was as stereotyped woman she was broken — by a man. Her final, defeated, speech describes men, not women, as suffering ‘painful labour’, erasing women’s lived reality.
This lived reality is now being questioned by gender ideologies that are rolling back a century of progress in women’s rights and safety. Three books about gender politics treat these issues with different skills, methods and points of view: Zoe Playdon, Emeritus Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of London; Helen Joyce, an executive editor at The Economist; and Janice G. Raymond, Professor Emerita in Women’s Studies and Medical Ethics at The University of Massachusetts.
Playdon brings engaging narrative skills to her story of Ewan Forbes-Sempill’s legal struggle for recognition as the male heir to a Scottish baronetcy in the 1960s. Born in 1912, youngest child of the Lord Sempill, Forbes’ sex was recorded as female, but he lived in adulthood as a man. At 40, he had his birth certificate corrected and married a local woman.
When Forbes’s brother died childless in 1965, a male cousin sued for the inheritance, arguing Forbes was female. The case went to private arbitration in Scotland’s Court of Sessions in 1967. Forbes’ winning argument was that he had an intersex condition in which physical maleness developed as he matured.
Playdon obtained the case records and argues that Forbes was biologically female, and consequently a trans man. She asserts that he falsified medical evidence and goes on to argue that this case created British legal precedent for transgender rights by allowing a person recorded as female at birth to inherit later as a trans man.
'The phenomenon of wholesale ideological capture of governments, corporations and public policy-making bodies needs more investigation than is given here.'
But this ignores the judge’s written formal finding: that Forbes, being ‘hermaphroditic’, had a ‘male-oriented psychology’ that derived from a ‘dominant male physiology’. Moreover, in the case extract I have sourced, the judge went out of his way to say that if Forbes’ case had relied on psychological evidence only, he would have lost. The decision depended entirely on the judge’s acceptance of the medical evidence that Forbes was actually male. Thus Playdon’s central assertion — that this case represented a precedent for transgender rights in British law — fails both there, and also by the fact that a private arbitration in the Scottish Court of Sessions does not form precedent in British law.
Playdon’s argument may be flimsy, but her book is a rattling good read, full of chatty social history and gossipy newspaper snippets. Her sympathy for Forbes is evident, but her assertion that the judgment was pro-transgender rights forces her conclusion without facts. She weaves a persuasive yarn, but with a torrent of speculation, footnotes and large bibliography that do not corroborate her assertions with actual evidence.
Evidence, on the other hand, is what Joyce deals with: her arguments and conclusions follow strong logical lines and her historical backgrounding is clear and relevant. Trans has had favourable reviews in mainstream press overseas, but has been criticised by trans activists for questioning gender ideology. Joyce says her intention is not to attack transgender human rights and dignity; she is concerned about gender ideology’s effects on free speech and thought in civil society, politics and academia. How has the gender ideology movement come to be so powerful against questioning?
Joyce sees the conflict’s roots in the decline of philosophy and of women’s studies as the ascendancy of French postmodernists undermined agreed frameworks concerning the value of language and logic. The rise of US academic Judith Butler’s gender ideology has been meteoric and its adherents are fervent. Gone are open discussions between left and right, traditionalist and reformer: the mantra is ‘no debate’ — a travesty of liberal arts education.
Joyce claims that a small number of American billionaire trans activists have been funding Butlerian gender studies and lobbying global policymaking bodies; she also argues that pharmaceutical company profits are a compelling motivation to push experimental and irreversible drug therapies on gender-dysphoric children, creating clients for life. However, the phenomenon of wholesale ideological capture of governments, corporations and public policy-making bodies needs more investigation than is given here.
One disturbing case she recounts has had widespread media coverage: that of ‘Kai’: a child born male who wished to wear dresses. His mother, a Texan fundamentalist Christian and unabashed homophobe, said in a 2017 documentary that having a gay son ‘could not happen’, and she would ‘really spank’ the toddler for asserting ‘I’m a girl’. The transitioning of the child took place at age four: ‘I now have a happy … beautiful sweet little girl who loves Jesus and loves her brothers’. If this is not homophobic conversion therapy, I don’t know what is.
Joyce recounts studies showing that when gender-nonconforming children were allowed to be themselves without pressured intervention, they overwhelmingly developed into healthy gay adults. Unlike Shakespeare’s trousered girls, transed youngsters can’t simply go back to a healthy functioning body. This is corroborated in Reddit’s r/detrans |Detransition subreddit, which has over 25,000 subscribers – the stories make piteous reading. Many say that they needed emotional support and mental health therapy rather than the gender clinics’ automatic affirmation protocols. They describe a rush to treat them as though they were literally born in ‘wrong bodies’. They describe expriences of surgeries that have left them mutilated; hormone therapy has left them with permanent voice and hair changes, kidney and liver damage, osteoporosis, sterility, incontinence and sexual dysfunction.
'The rights and wrongs of what has happened in recent years regarding the experience and sufferings of transgender people have ended up as a polarised and difficult area of discourse, affecting women’s lives and rights far more than men’s.'
They were asked to consent to such treatments when their juvenile personalities were still forming, before their brains were fully able to grasp the full implications. The coming flood of litigation will be interesting, since gender clinics routinely require clients to sign boilerplate indemnity documents.
The collision between trans activists’ demands and women’s and children's rights isn’t going away. Should male-bodied convicts be able to identify as women in order to be placed in women’s prisons? Should lesbians be expected to accept trans women as sexual partners? Trans documents the colonisation of women’s sports and the erasure of female-specific words such as ‘mother’ and ‘women’ in favour of dehumanising terms such as ‘birthing bodies’ and ‘menstruators’. It raises the question, are transgender activists demanding equality — or privilege?
Joyce urges readers to address all people’s needs and rights, saying that liberal secular democracies should not privilege one belief system, quoting transgender people who feel unsupported by the juggernaut of the extreme trans activist movement.
Janice Raymond traces a similar path, but with the vigour and passion of someone who has experienced the kind of academic censorship and personal attacks that Helen Joyce documents. Raymond has had a stellar career both as a respected academic in women’s studies and as a campaigner against the trafficking and exploitation of women.
As a gender-critical lesbian, however, she has experienced discrimination, even violence, from all sides. Here, in Doublethink, the gloves are off. She sees trans activism as an extension of the patriarchal subjugation of women, offering searing evidence of misogyny and homophobia in the imposition of sexual stereotyping and the pervasiveness of Orwellian compelled language: rape victims have been ordered under threat of contempt of court to refer to their transgender rapists as ‘she’. She investigates the rapid rollout of trans activist policies in governments, academia, sports and corporations.
Raymond’s anger is patent, but the argument is necessarily clear and well-evidenced, for lesbians are vulnerable and marginalised, with many organisations no longer supporting them when they refuse trans women as sexual partners. Her disillusion with the left is patent: women, long oppressed by those on the right who deny them control over their own bodies, must now cope with those on the left who deny them safe spaces and the right to speak their own truth.
The rights and wrongs of what has happened in recent years regarding the experience and sufferings of transgender people have ended up as a polarised and difficult area of discourse, affecting women’s lives and rights far more than men’s. In the current situation, Raymond is a clear voice about the erosion of women’s rights and safety in what should be the safest, most pluralistic arena of all: academia. For anyone wishing for a general introduction, Trans is valuable. If you like historical speculation, try The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes.
Juliette Hughes is a freelance writer.
Main image: Woman standing against rainbow lights (Qi Yang / Getty Images).