Stop using trans men to make a point about the exclusion of trans women

Trans people cannot be expected to put our bodies on the line to satisfy a hypothetical argument.

By Jane Migliara Brigham

Yesterday, Dec. 3, The Women’s Institute, a large civil society organization with extensive membership in the United Kingdom, has announced that it will no longer be accepting trans women as members of their organization.  The Women’s Institute claims to be the largest civil society organization for women within the UK, at over 190,000 members.

Their press release claims that this was necessary due to the Supreme Court ruling in April, but nothing in that ruling requires them to exclude trans women, and they have not provided any evidence that this decision was made based on potential legal challenges or the threat thereof.  

They claim that this change was made in anticipation of future guidance from the EHRC, not based on any current law.

You wouldn’t know any of this if you saw the PinkNews article on the matter.  Their headline reads: “Trans men can now join the Women’s Institute under new policy”.  

There are many problems with this framing.  

The first and most obvious problem is that it is factually wrong.  The press release states that membership will be restricted to “biological women only”.  

Whether the Women’s Institute is going to take the Supreme Court ruling to its logical conclusion, and consider trans men to be women for the purpose of membership, is not addressed at all.  

Given that the Women’s Institute’s stated goal is fighting for the interests of women in general, there is absolutely no reason to assume that they would do that.  Given that men are not mentioned in this press release at all, the thought probably never crossed the Institute’s mind.

However, the blatant lie in the headline is hardly the worst thing about it.

The next problem is that by claiming that trans men can join the Women’s Institute (without evidence), it enables the framing of the gender conservatives that trans men are innately women.  

I would expect this framing from open bigots, but an outlet that claims to be the “world’s largest and most influential LGBTQ+ led media brand” ought to know how dangerous this rhetoric is for the very people that they claim to be defending.  

I suspect that they don't care, because the headline was caused by the third problem: it was in service of a mean-spirited and shallow joke about how trans men can be used as a rhetorical tool to mock the discrimination of trans women.  

In this way, the invisibility of trans men broadly relies on the hypervisibility of trans women.

One group is reduced to a rhetorical jester, the other is forced into the category of a threat.

This rhetoric comes up when gender conservatives say that trans people cannot change their sex, and will always innately be the sex and/or gender they were assigned at birth.  

In response, many “allies” with shallow understandings of trans life claim that trans people should make a show of using the facilities of their sex as birth as a protest against the absurdity of these policies.  

In other words, they want trans people to go out of our ways to make fools of themselves by implicitly misgendering themselves as a protest act.

This usually comes up in the context of trans people being banned from public bathrooms.  One common response by these “allies” is that trans people should comply by going into the bathrooms that they obviously don't look like they belong in, and make it obvious how much they stand out.

This is a fast way to get trans people assaulted, or worse.

The boundaries between the men’s and women’s are often enforced by the threat of violence, which is why trans people who don't think they pass are frequently nervous when entering public bathrooms with cis people.  

There is a reason you almost never see trans people following this advice. The few who do tend to catch charges, or at least catch hands.

But the idea has stuck around.  I have been hearing it as either a joke or a serious idea for as long as trans bathroom bans have been talked about.

In recent years, as gender conservatives have gotten more powerful and trans people have become more persecuted, the amount of gendered spaces which are restricted to only those of a given birth sex at birth have only grown.  

Every time trans women are barred from some gendered space, there are calls for trans men to take their place in protest.  For all the reasons listed above, this is a terrible idea.  

The rhetorical trap further invisibilizes trans men, while also making trans women’s hypervisibility a greater threat.  It plays directly into the gender conservative framing.

However, those reasons don’t get at the main point: trans people have no obligation to make fools of themselves and put themselves in danger to serve as a rhetorical point.

There’s also a reason why trans men in particular are called on to play the role of jester: they aren’t taken seriously. 

Many self-proclaimed allies think of trans men as not being actual men, but as spicy women.  As a result, trans men are seen first and foremost as comic figures, whose actual needs and concerns are not important enough to notice.

This hand-waving can be seen in the PinkNews headline.  That’s the actual main problem with the headline.

Trans men are too often used as a rhetorical tool in arguments against transphobes, rather than brought up as actual people with actual concerns.  If you think of trans men as spicy women, you are going to mentally file them in the same category as actual women, even when your rhetoric says they ought to be treated as men.

And that’s how a story about the open discrimination of trans women from a women’s organization can be transformed into a joke about how trans men should take their place.  

No one ever thinks about how absurd and demeaning it would be for trans men to take the places that were specifically made for women, but then again, these people don't think about trans men much at all.

We trans people have the right to safety, just like everyone else.  Asking us to enter gendered spaces where we don't belong goes against this.

There is only one decent option for dealing with trans people in gendered spaces: let us go where we feel we belong.  Any other option makes us look and feel ridiculous, and insisting that we follow some other option makes you look ridiculous.