c.f. Transphobia.
A few weeks ago a prominent philosophy professor and ‘gender critic’ named Kathleen Stock was awarded an OBE for her ‘outstanding’ contribution to higher education, specifically for her vehement defence of free speech in the academe - a right that has increasingly become synonymous with transphobia. Stock used her new found platform to take to twitter and further berate the lives, identities, and bodily autonomy of trans people. She raged that trans activists were both harming and silencing the experiences of women (and by women she means people with XX chromosomes), as well as brainwashing girls into believing they are boys. This in turn sparked a wider (but by no means new) debate regarding trans rights (also known as the ‘trans question’, a direct [but often unacknowledged] take on the ‘Jewish question’ popular in the 19th and 20th century) in the academe.
It’s a curious thing to have your identity objectified and debated, not simply on twitter, but in all areas of the social and political sphere. What a slippery issue we are. How strange my trans body is. Our strangeness is pertinent because it is through this lens that we are carefully crafted into strangers, shadowy figures that strike fear (and fascination) in the minds of cis people. We incite, to borrow from Sara Ahmed, a unique form of ‘stranger danger’ (2000) whereby our bodies becomes a point of caution not by personhood, but by proximity — don’t come to close! You’re not welcome here! As such, we need to be controlled if the status quo is to be maintained. One strand of this carceral tactic is that everyone is granted an opinion on our rights and dignity, our access to health care, bathrooms, housing, jobs. “Should trans people live without fear of violence: implicit and explicit, physical and physic - discuss!” No longer considered human, we become abstract and perverse discussion points, often vilified, always Othered. For academic freedom, our bodies are turned into mausoleums.
I am a PhD student (a precarious position to inhabit at the best of times) and it took me a long while to come out as trans at uni. Indeed, it is very much still in process. I held back because I was, and remain to be, afraid - and my fear is well placed. Trans exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) originated in UK universities and ironically have a tendency to work in social justice, my area. University College London (UCL), in particular the Institute of Education (IOE), where my research assistant role is based, is riddled with ‘gender critics’ posing as feminists. Such is the capacity of TERFs at UCL they were able to publish an open letter in the Guardian defending the trans exclusionary hate group ‘Woman’s Place UK’. One of the lead authors of this letter is head of my department, the other is PI on a major project on equity, and head of UCL’s Social Research Institute (!). Friends of Kathleen Stock, these are powerful people, fighting against my having basic human rights, which I am expected to sit in meetings with. This is what it is to be the asterisk at the bottom of the diversity form (Mokobe 2015).
I drew this self portrait (from my covid riddled bed) because I thought it might help people better understand not only the intertwined strength and vulnerability of the trans body, but also the simplicity of it. We are not, as so many people would have you believe, monstrous strangers violating women and corrupting children. We are human beings just like you, with hopes and dreams, hobbies and quirks, bad habits and good ones, and we deserve to live our lives without fear, to leave our house without violence, to go to work without harm, to be loved and respected, to be left in peace.
I drew this self-portrait to stress that it is not a concept or an idea, a thesis or a framework, that is being sacrificed in the name of free speech, it is people. Flesh, and blood, and bone. How many more trans bodies, I wonder, must walk into oncoming traffic, before the academe not simply recognises, but takes accountability for, the colossal pain it has caused.
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Ahmed, S. (2000). Who knows? Knowing strangers and strangerness. Australian feminist studies, 15(31), 49-68.
Mokobe, L. (2015). "I was the mystery of an anatomy, a question asked but not answered,". Ted Women 2015.