Confusing History with Conspiracy
Revisiting "The Political Erasure Of Sex" in light of attempted smears
I previously wrote about the use of smears as an effective means of discrediting ideological opponents, but as a follow-on, I want to look at another instance of how vague accusations of laundering conspiracies are especially disingenuous and hard to refute.
A couple of weeks ago, in response to the original article on conspiracy laundering, Jane Clare Jones had posted a lengthy thread explaining how - as part of her project on The Political Erasure Of Sex - she investigated the history of transactivism starting from current legislative attacks on sex in the UK, through the history of Press For Change, back to the International Conference on Transgender Law and Employment Policy (ICTLEP) in 1992. This conference was instigated by Phyllis Frye - “the Grandmother of transgender rights” - and involved important contributions on health and law from Martine Rothblatt. The point being, this is an easily verifiable piece of history, and overbroad accusations of conspiracy laundering act to stifle legitimate discussion.
In response, she was - predictably - accused of conspiracism, simply because of the overlap between Martine Rothblatt, and The Skeptic’s article about a billionaire, transhumanist psy-op conspiracy.
Funnily enough, the original piece in The Skeptic says:
claiming that trans activism is secretly a psy-op by billionaires is already bad from a conspiratorial perspective. It also erases decades of activism
But in this exchange, it is the false accusation of conspiracism that “erases decades of activism”. As a result, I thought I would go back and revisit some of that early material, and show how some of those ideas have played out in the subsequent decades of activism.
In 1992, for the first ICTLEP meeting, Martine Rothblatt - who was at the time going by the name Marla Aspen - authored this document which draws on medico-legal precedent and the ideology of the time to lay out a proposed template for the shape transsexual and transgender activism should take.
Saying that this happened is not a conspiracy theory, it is history. This is just describing what activists do.
The aims and strategies in the document will be familiar to anyone immersed in the current debate because it proved to be a highly successful approach. Whether these were wholly original ideas at the time or synthesised contemporary thinking among the transsexual activists is not terribly relevant because the point here is not to paint Martine Rothblatt as a puppet master, or having perpetuated a “psy-op”, it is to show where present day activism finds some of its origins.
Indeed, the document is refreshingly candid and sincere, frequently using clear language throughout that modern activists would absolutely shy away from. It draws the important distinction that sex is understood as anatomy, while gender is role play, clothes and behaviour:
Summarizing our definitions of sex and gender, the former is a classification of life into males and females based predominantly on anatomy. Gender is a classification of life into masculine and feminine based predominantly on role-playing behavior.
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From an empirical standpoint, a transgendered person is one who takes on the clothes, mannerisms or other features of the gender not associated with one's anatomical sex. It is then clear that transsexuals are a subset of transgendered people, namely that subset which also wants the sexual anatomy associated with the other gender.
Similarly, the document plainly states the belief that sexual orientation is not attraction to sexual anatomy, but to gender (again: role play, clothes and behaviour):
"sexual orientation" encompasses "social sex", which is essentially synonymous with "gender."
To anyone who understands their sexual orientation is fundamentally towards male and female sexed bodies - rather than role play, clothes and behaviour - this represents wholesale erasure. The vast majority of people would (until recently) have recognised that saying gay men can be attracted to “masculine” women is both homophobic and sexist. Similarly, to suggest that a lesbian who is attracted to both “butch” and “femme” women is bisexual (pp360) is, again, homosexual erasure - but both of these claims flow logically from the assertion that orientation is towards gender.
Activists had an opportunity here to perhaps coin new terms to reflect new realities, embracing the fact that people with modified sex characteristics present a challenge to existing terms for sexual orientation - but they did not do so, instead choosing the path of redefining and undermining the terms used by existing groups.
When the BBC gradually changed its style guide 20 years later, to redefine homosexuality and bisexuality in gender terms, it was adopting this regressive belief, however unknowingly, that same-sex attraction encompasses role play, clothes and behaviour. When Stonewall changed its glossary of terms in 2015 to redefine homosexuality as same-gender attraction, it was perpetrating the same erasure of sexual orientation.
Later in the document this homosexual erasure is posited as a solution for the (then-illegal) same-sex marriage issue:
A more fundamental approach to "same-sex" marriages is to redefine "sex" as a "continuum of anatomical, behavioral, and biological characteristics from masculine to feminine." Marital limitations to "opposite sexes" would no longer have meaning.
The author fully understands that defining sex as an anatomical and social spectrum means that there is no longer any such thing as same-sex (or both-sex) orientation, because sex no longer has meaning.
Aside from the clarity of its philosophical underpinnings, here are some of the important strategic aims taken from the document:
- Sex should be removed as a legal classification
The goal for progressive changes in transgender law is to remove classifications of people based on sex or gender. Such a goal may not be realistically attainable in the near-term, because of the deeply ingrained nature of sexual differentiation in the human species.
- Attach transgender interests to the LGB, under the term “sexual orientation and gender identification” (SOGI).
the best strategy for progressive change is to group three gender-oriented communities together into a single "sexual orientation and gender identification" suspect class. These three groups are gays, lesbians and transgendered persons. The reason for this strategy is that the size and prevalence of the gay and lesbian groups will be critically necessary to help the nearly invisible transgender community gain recognition
- Deliberately confuse sex and gender
in normal language usage, there is a tremendous semantic overlap between gender and sex, with few people knowing or recognizing the difference. If defining transgenderism as related to a sexual orientation accelerates legal protection for trans gendered people, then semantic purity has been sacrificed for a worthy goal.
- Single-sex services are akin to racism, and should all be unisex
Which restroom does a transgendered person use? Any restroom, because "male" and "female" signs will be no more appropriate on restroom doors than are "white" and "colored" signs today.
- Sex-based rights cannot exist
to define sex as a continuum of male and female anatomical, behavioral and biological characteristics, and not as a basis for categorization of people, their rights, or obligations.
- Create academic output to support legal change
The academic community is gradually accepting "that differences between men and women are social, rather than inherent and natural .... " Sylvia Law, "Homosexuality and the Social Meaning of Gender," 1988 Wisc. L. Rev. 187, 212. This is an important step because the judicial system will want scientific back-up for any definition of sex.
All these aims are in service of the removal of psychiatric gatekeeping of transition (so it becomes a cosmetic choice instead of a mental health issue), and ultimately the erasure of the concept of sex.
Continued medicalization of transgenderism sets up a tier of psychologists as the gatekeepers of what we do with our own bodies, unfairly paints the entire transgender community with the brush of mental illness, and maintains the pernicious fiction of separate male and female classes of people
…
the most progressive direction for health law is toward a de-classification of sex and a de-medicalization of transgenderism.
This is what has become in modern parlance “self id”. The current Scottish Gender Recognition Reform Bill aims to do exactly this - completely demedicalise the process of changing legal sex. This recent judgement in Scotland (that permits people to answer the “sex” question in the Scottish Census however they choose) considers sex to be akin to mood. An internal state of mind. This is the political and legislative erasure of sex and sexual orientation as meaningful concepts.
Pointing all this out isn’t to say that someone has been nefariously pulling the strings for 30 years in a “transhumanist psy-op”, it is to say that - whatever their own personal motivations - the proposals written here in 1992 amongst a group of activists proved to be staggeringly effective. Those activists did what activists do. They worked towards what they wanted to achieve using whatever means they could.
The form this activism took was not so much marching or waving placards to build public support - it was targeted at institutions and legislation, which means there is overall a lack of public awareness of the actual intent. Yet despite this widespread public ignorance, after decades of lobbying and working groups and fundraisers and academic conferences the novel claims made back then are now accepted as a given at the highest levels of many of our institutions.
To reiterate - it did not have to be this way. Activists could have used new, or clearer language, could have dealt with this new reality as a widening of human possibility on its own terms. It was a conscious choice to co-opt and erase the language and protections for sex and sexual orientation in service of particular ideas about what transsexualism and transgenderism mean.
So while the UK Gender Recognition Act seems to use “gender” as a synonym for “sex”, as most people would have understood it at the time, as Stephen Whittle wrote in 2007 and as this 2018 FOI response makes clear, the actual intent is to supercede sex with gender.
Well-meaning legislation produced by incurious politicians ostensibly for a tiny minority of medically-assessed individuals struggling with their sexed anatomy turned out to have wide-ranging ramifications for all of society, for sexual orientation, and for our understanding of ourselves as a sexed species.
And reading all this archived material from 1992 makes it clear that this was the point.
In the original thread, attempting to talk about actual history, with references, was deemed similar enough to a “laundered conspiracy theory” to be dismissed wholesale, and as such Jane Clare Jones was smeared in the worst way. The allegation of conspiracy laundering is so broad, stigmatising and free of evidence that it is capable of being deployed against pretty much anyone. I believe that, whatever the true intent, the result of overuse of such damaging insinuations on such insubstantial evidence is that many will simply consider them bad faith attempts at silencing, rather than legitimate concerns about “conspiracy laundering”. It only ends up creating an increasingly polarised feedback loop of conspiracist accusations.
The fact is she was not handwaving about “billionaire psy-ops”, but detailing how the activism of today has evolved from what was presented at ICTLEP, what activists hoped to achieve, and what strategies for achieving these goals were discussed. She showed the documented underlying aims, and how these were achieved over the years with the subsequent efforts (certainly in the UK) of Press For Change and others, and so on, to where we are now with the widespread political erasure of sex.
Note: edited 17/03/2022 to add link to FOI from here.
Addendum: 07/09/2022
After a little more digging, I thought it worthwhile to expand a little on a couple of points to show how these ideas made their way into the UK activist context via Stephen Whittle and Christine Burns of Press for Change.
Firstly, it is worth pointing out, according to Phyllis Frye, that the “I” in ICTLEP is specifically because of Stephen Whittle’s involvement.
Originally it was the Transgender Law Conference. As the committee became more active, we realized, that without employment protection, the rest was only dressing, so we made it the Transgender Law and Employment Policy Conference. Then I received a letter from Stephan Whittle of England, who said if it was an international conference, he could probably secure university funding to attend. Thus International was added to the name.
Secondly, in August, Malcolm Clark pointed to this 1998 blogpost by Christine Burns, explaining the origins of the idea of removing sex as a legal classification:
Burns claims to have first heard this at a 1993 Colloquy in Amsterdam, from Dr Michael Will, who was repeating what was said by a Judge van der Reijt in the introductory speech.
Here is the relevant section of Will’s presentation:
The statements referenced in van der Reijt’s opening are here:
As well as Christine Burns, Stephen Whittle was also present:
But more importantly, so was Martine Rothblatt:
In fact, Rothblatt wasn’t only present, but was invited to deliver a substantially similar presentation to the 1992 ICTLEP health law report:
…
While it is pared down, whole sections are identical, and the core aims and justifications are unchanged.
Another presenter, Jaap Doek, made reference to the idea of removing sex designations and - like Rothblatt - treating sex as a continuum:
Did van der Reijt and Doek independently arrive at these ideas, or is this a result of reading Rothblatt’s 1992 report, or the 1993 “Perspective” that was submitted to the Colloquy? Was this an idea that was already floating around in medico-legal circles, and Rothblatt was just the first to write it down, or the only one whose writing is preserved in an accessible digital form?
Whatever the truth, I can find no earlier work that explicitly calls for the erasure of sex in law as a goal of transactivism than the 1992 ICTLEP health law report, and in 1993 we can see this idea disseminated amongst activists, who ran with it to great effect over the subsequent 30 years.