Jan Bergstra & Laurens Buijs
Amsterdam Gender Theory Research Team
There are several organizations and groups that claim to stand up for transgender interests and rights. For example Stonewall but also closer to home the Transgender Network Netherlands (TNN). But this is a careless and difficult claim to maintain, because it too easily assumes the accuracy of the concepts of gender and gender transition that those organizations themselves advocate. In this blog, we discuss how and why that can be an issue.
With original transgender rights (original transgender rights) we denote those rights of a person P that are associated with the recognized transgender status (e.g., of P as a woman) that arise in the first instance from: (a) P’s desire for gender transition (we assume that P assigned male at birth (AMAB) was), (b) the performance of operative procedures traditional to a morphological gender transition, and (c) the initiated and also continued artificial adjustment of relevant hormone levels. As described in AGTRT-4, sometimes a weakening of these requirements is plausible, and in AGTRT-BF32 we described the extent to which we believe these requirements can be further weakened.
By experimental transgender rights(experimental transgender rights) we denote the rights that transactivists wish to grant to a person P who claims to be transgender on the basis of self-identification of one’s gender identity. For example, as Kirk-Gianinni describes (see AGTRT-BF49), the scope and impact of self-identification can plausibly be narrowed in some circumstances so that even experimental transgender rights involve different variants. Experimental transgender rights not only involve “experimental rights” for transgender persons but the granting of transgender status to those persons is itself experimental.
In any case, from FGT, we want to stand up for original transgender rights. Those rights are permanently under pressure from various sides, such as TERF ideology and TEFC ideology (see AGTRT- BDF43 and AGTRT-BF44), but also from other sides.
What does not contribute to the original transgender rights is the fact that the right to medical/hormonal transition is now also granted to young children and that there has been great criticism from all sides of the seemingly all too easy handling of this (see AGTRT-BF66 and AGTRT-BF78). But we see those abuses as problems with experimental transgender rights. It is the too easy handling of transgender status (for example, assigning it to a 9-year-old child based on little solid data) which causes these problems.
What we now believe we are seeing is that trans activists (including Stonewall), with their push for experimental transgender rights, are arousing great opposition which then creates a climate in which original transgender rights also come under serious pressure. This is what we previously described as the principle of paradoxical support: the trans movement digs its own grave (see also AGTRT-BF30).
Making an adequate distinction between original transgender rights and experimental transgender rights can prevent the basically legitimate pursuit of adapting the definition of gender (in an experimental direction) and establishment of associated transgender rights at the expense of original transgender rights.
From FGT, we criticize co-essentialist pursuit of experimental transgender rights along two different lines.
- We sometimes disagree substantively with the modifications to the concept of gender proposed or used in such an experiment.
- We feel that it is far too easy to expose original transgender rights to the risk that they may come under pressure from the social resistance that inevitably accompanies such an experiment regarding the definition of gender and the introduction of associated rights.
In a gender-political sense, FGT has two main goals (1 and 2) and two secondary goals (3 and 4):
- Providing a critical framework for experimentation with gender and transgender rights. We have described that framework in detail in our blogs in the context of the ICE methodology (see AGTRT-BF55).
- Standing up for and continually motivating original transgender rights.
- Advocating for the development of limited application and interpretation of neutral gender.
- (Re)introducing the current psychoanalytic tradition to the analysis of the concept of gender identity (but that project falls within what we call ABGT )