#90

Sara from FiLiA in conversation with Heather Brunskill-Evans ‘Transgendering Children’

Sara: Welcome to the FiLiA Podcast. My name is Sara, I'm one of the volunteers, and I am hugely honoured today to be speaking with Dr. Heather Brunskell-Evans, whose voice and feminist analyses and passionate defense of women's sex-based rights are likely very familiar to our listeners. Thank you so much for being on the podcast, and this time as our interviewee, Heather. Is it okay for you to maybe start by saying a couple words about yourself and your work for anyone who might not know who you are already?

Heather: Alright. So I am an academic, I have a background in philosophy and social theory. I am increasingly a political activist nowadays, so I've slightly reversed the trend that people, you know, this sort of biographical trend that is normal where you are politically active as a young person, and you get less and less so the older you get. So I've reversed that. 

I've always been politically active by the way, but I feel absolutely that I have voice into what is going on currently for women. I'm completely empowered to do so. So that has increased my activism. I might live to regret it, but at the moment I'm still hanging on in there.

Sara: And we're very grateful that you are, I have to say. Today we're going to be talking about the subject that I think you would count as someone who's quite a leading expert in this area, transgender children. And, for any listener who's not really familiar with it, would it be okay for you to outline for us: what does the term ‘transgender child’ mean in the popular consciousness? And why do you instead use this other phrase, called the transgendering of children?

Heather: I'm really pleased you started with that question, Sara, because it gets to the heart of where the difficulty is, in talking about the medical transitioning of children, because people really do believe there is such a thing as a transgender child. And that there's some inherent inside it, which makes it different from other children, and something that makes it unhappy, and that needs to be recognised and dealt with.

And of course, if this were true, all of us would want to – particularly me, since I'm concerned about children – would be concerned to help this condition and to find ways to help the child resolve it. So I can quite see why people get upset when they think… when in fact the transgendered child is a real phenomenon that exists outside of whatever we say about it has a real condition, like, I don't know, you can be born with a cleft palate, for example, and this child has been born this way and it makes very light of it to say that it's socially constructed. 

Well, I'm going to start by saying that I think that the transgender child doesn't exist, but has come through the narratives of lobby groups such as Mermaids, Gendered Intelligence, Stonewall, Trans Activism, which has created the idea of the transgender child. So much so now, that in fact our education system calls upon some of these groups to come into schools and teach parents, teachers, and children about the inherent qualities of the transgender child. So no wonder people actually believe in this. It's one of the most dominant narratives in our culture at the moment.

So, and attendant is the idea that transgender children, if you don't recognise they’re transgender, they're going to commit suicide; “better have a live daughter than a dead son”, or vice versa, and so on and so forth. So the general public has got a very strong belief system in the existence of the transgender child.

Understandably, this isn't a criticism of anybody who does believe it, at all. Why wouldn't you believe it? But the minute you start researching it, and thinking about it, you realise that these are various layers of meaning have been, one on top of the other, that has brought the transgender child into existence.

The idea that there is such a thing as a transgender child, would just not have made any sense to the general public 20 or 30 years ago, it's now absolutely commonplace. Everybody knows about transgender children. So in researching transgender children, I've gone back over the years and found out the ways in which, you know, I've analysed the ways in which this figure of the transgender child has been made concrete through different stories.

And that would be fine too, if we helped children, but my argument is that it's one of the most destructive narratives that we can plant in children's and parents' minds. I don’t know whether to talk about sex and gender, and gender identity now, but I should briefly go into two completely different models that are being adopted here by those trans-affirmative lobby groups and gender critical feminists or theorists like myself.

So just briefly, the two different models are; that sex, biological sex, is socially constructed. This comes from the trans-affirmative narrative. So that sex is allegedly assigned, culturally assigned by whoever, midwives, parents, society, but that gender identity is somehow inborn. So it reverses the sex/gender distinction.

I think of gender as social stereotypes and so on, and I think of sex, biological sex, as a real phenomenon. I don't think it's assigned, I think it's absolutely real. I don't think we would've reproduced the human species if it wasn't. So a lot of arguments revolve around, a lot of arcane, complex, arguments revolve around the issue of sex, gender, and gender identity, which the general public quite understandably have no cognisance of whatsoever.

So they take, on face value, a rhetoric which was absolutely mobilised by trans activism. Absolutely. You can trace it back to the end of the 20th century, various activism around queer theory, can absolutely trace back to introducing into the public consciousness the idea that gender identity is a real phenomenon that pre-exists any social context in which you might feel your identity.

And it's that, bizarrely, 30 years down the line, which is now so commonplace, that if I walk down to the end of my street and knock on every door, every person in their household and the households in my street will think of the transgender child as being real. So my theoretical life now has been dedicated, in the past three or four years, to my cost probably, of exploring all of this and researching it.

Sara: Unpicking it, it sounds like.

Heather: Unpicking it, unpicking it, yeah. 

Sara: Challenging the notion that this is something that just is, rather than something that has been brought into being, perhaps. 

Heather: Yeah. 

Sara: Could you outline, there might be a question of why this is a feminist issue. So why is it specifically something that is worthy of feminist attention and feminist analysis? Like, how does the transgendering of children specifically affect women and girls? 

Heather: Good question. Well, if we go back to what I've just said about the body, the crucial arguments going on about the body: “Can you be born in the wrong body? Is gender identity something that's inherent? Is sex a real phenomenon, or is it socially constructed in some way?”

All of this brings us back to the body, and the minute you get to the body, you get to issues that have been pertinent for feminism, and for anybody who wants to see women have equality of rights and status and so on. Because the female body is the body that has been most harmed… narrative. Now I pace back a little bit in order to explain this.

So, firstly what I want to say is that the trans movement actually needs the child to normalise trans as inherent. If trans isn't inherent, then what you are saying is that trans adults have a sort of condition which is psychological and emotional, rather than something that just is. Now I'm not making any judgment about the psychological and emotional need to identify with another sex, I'm just pointing out the fact that in order to deflect from the psychological and emotional causation, if you say “children are born this way, I was born this way” effectively, if a man who identifies as a woman says, “I was born this way,” then it absolves all responsibility for his participation in a particular kind of politics.

So to normalise trans as inherent is an issue for boys and girls, obviously, because boys are affected by these narratives too. So a boy who maybe is attracted to things that we would conventionally or stereotypically think of as being a ‘girly’ activity or interest, then, is also incited to question whether he really is a girl inside his boy's body.

So, and as the mother of boys as well as girls, I'm concerned for boys, and I don't want this, as a feminist critique, as side-lined as if all we are concerned about are girls and women. Well, you know, I am concerned for boys too. 

I'm going to come back to the issue of why this is such a feminist issue, is that if a man can say he really is a woman, it is he who becomes firstly the controller of the language about what it is to be a woman, how we can talk about female bodies and which bodies can be protected and whose rights are the most vulnerable. If a man who identifies as a woman is accepted as is actually a woman, then you start dividing woman into two different categories, cis, a ridiculous concept, and trans. So woman is bifurcated into two different groups.

And so ‘trans women’, and putting that in inverted commas, say that yes, that they're feminists. They can see that women are oppressed, but given that they are women too, they're more oppressed than cis women because they are subject to transphobia as well as to sexism. And so we then get a hierarchy of needs and vulnerabilities.

So given that the man who identifies as a woman, the trans woman as it were, is the most oppressed of all people in all of society, then our ethical values become focused, our sensibilities. And as women our, you know, our socialised caring-ness gets focused on this poor man who's identifying as a woman, who really is a woman who needs all of our care and protection.

And actually what has happened is that then that's a route into men who identify as women actually controlling the narrative. It's been so shocking, I call it as a sort of men's rights movement, sort of imported into feminism, imported into society, in a Trojan horse in its way, as it were. Because it's monopolised, that ‘trans women are women’, is monopolising the whole dialogue of diversity, inclusion, equal rights.

So under diversity, which of course I also refute because I think it's confirming the stereotypes of gender more firmly than we've had for the past 50 years, actually. The consequence of this of course, means that what we are doing is we're allowing men to enter into all women's spaces. This is before the Gender Recognition Act is even reformed, if it's going to be now. Thankfully there is some dispute about that, because of the work done in order to resist this men's rights movement. But as it's existed, since about 2015, there's been an incremental, very rapid facilitation of men who identify as women to enter into all female spaces without any brake on that.

And there's a whole history of that, it's demonstrable how that has happened. But the consequences are, we've let men as alleged women into women's sports, into women's refuges, and so on and so forth. And given there is still a social hierarchy between men and women, and given that there is still sexual violence, which is quite prevalent, it is astonishing to me.

It's astonishing to me how this has been enabled to have happened. So I'm going to use a very old-fashioned term now, patriarchy, which is problematical in itself because it actually means the rule of the father and it's dated and become something else. But if I can just use that word in a simplistic way at the moment, it's quite clearly in operation in our society that we could even consider this, that we could even vilify a woman who objects to such a thing as the person who is bigoted, as the person who needs to be remonstrated with, and not the men who are actually, without boundaries now, being allowed to move into our spaces.

And so the laws that we've had to protect spaces is just, they're being overridden, just overridden. Women who identify as male do not pose a threat to men. So often people say to me, “oh, you bang on about, you know, men who identify as women, but women who identify as men. It is an equal opportunity possibility here.”

And of course that is how it's presented. It is about equality of opportunity. Women are entitled to… are born in the wrong body, and they're men, as much as men can do that about themselves in relation to women. 

Well, you know, without going into it too much, obviously women can go into men's prisons if they want to. They can. Women who identify as men, they can go into men's toilets. These women who identify as men are not a threat to men. Men couldn't care. In fact, with my cynical hat on, I might say actually, do you know what men, men in men's prisons might quite like the introduction of women who identify as men into their prisons.

The other thing is, you know, if men's rights were being curtailed by women who identify as men, do you think men would put up with it? Absolutely not. Do you think men would be happy to be described as prostate-holders rather than men? Women who identify as men is not affecting men, which is again, another example of the way that this is a feminist issue. It isn't equivalent at all, women identifying as men and men identifying as women. So you have to look at the larger social structures and the transgender issue is being played out. 

Sara: I think the other issue, just when you were talking, is the fact that it is almost like a pincer movement in a sense, because you're disrupting that category, ‘woman’, as a sex-based category, not only by, I don't know, having some sort of strange non-definition of… be a woman because you need to include some men, but at the same time, the word woman then gets almost disrupted from the other side because you split it off into bodily functions, for example, that women do. Because in an attempt to be, quote unquote inclusive of women who don't identify as women, what you end up doing is, you disrupt the entire, sort of the unifying features, perhaps of what it is to be female, from the sort of ‘uterus-havers’ to ‘menstruaters’ to, you know, ‘pregnant person’. And I'm like, well, look, there's a golden thread connecting all of this. But it's almost like the new taboo is, is being able to say the word woman to describe the category of people that this happens to.

Heather: It's absolutely fascinating. There's a terrible irony in that fact that it's women now who can't talk about their bodies. It's men who say they are women who can talk about bodies all the time. including that it doesn't matter whether you have a female body in order to be a woman. So the body is being talked about, the female body is being talked about ad nauseum by men who identify as women and their supporters. The people who can't talk about their bodies is women, is the category of women, I mean, yeah. 

Sara: In the attempt to be quote unquote inclusive, you end up being quite exclusive. And you end up losing the whole analysis of why do these sorts of discriminations happen against pregnant people, for example, is it just at random, do you think? No. Speaking of young females who identify as men or non-binary, we have noticed that medical professionals in the UK and internationally have seen an exponential increase in the rise of females who identify as men or non-binary.

And I think the argument from a lot of transgender rights activists is that this is actually just a really good thing because they're all just quote unquote coming out as transgender due to maybe issues like better societal acceptance, like you mentioned. You can go now to every house on your street and ask, “what is a transgender child?,” and the, kind of, general public will have some sort of awareness of this. 

So why would someone who is feminist say that actually this pattern is a bit of a problem? And what do you think might be the reasons that more and more particularly young females seem to, in my view, no longer want to identify as girls and women?

Heather: The idea that it's progressive and the reason why the general public have accepted that it's progressive is based on the model that transgender is innate.

So if it is innate and people have had to repress this inherent characteristic, you know, since the whole of, you know, since human beings ever began as it were, then it would be progressive if people were allowed, if young people were allowed to come out of the closet as it were and say, “actually I'm really a boy, or I'm really a girl.” But it's a fabricated idea, transgenderism. And so, for me, the fact that lots and lots of young people now are very wedded to the idea that they are transgender, they see it as a way of expressing their true authentic selves and so on, I think that this is one of the biggest disservices that we have done young people. And I think we're abdicating our responsibilities as adults here.

This issue of transgenderism, this is allegedly something that parents and caring adults must facilitate. We must allow that we give the child the lead, the child leads us. Well, given that on the other hand, we look at it with another hat on, we know perfectly well that teenagers go through different phases of development, that they love to belong to tribes, we just have to look back at our own teenage years and so on. And we know that teenagers are very affected by their social groups, what they see on the media and and so forth. So we're almost schizophrenic about it. With this, we want to isolate it. We want to say this is completely an absolutely distinct from any other aspect of this teenager. In this area alone, this teenager a) is not affected by the social context in which he or she is living, and b) knows precisely the truth about herself, can predict into the future that she will always have this identity and that she knows better than the rest of us. 

So, you know, parents… into performing in a certain way, and what parents do is they abdicate their responsibility of caring, actually, of setting boundaries, of caring and letting the teenager know, I know the teenager wouldn't like it, that actually sometimes the grownups who are in the position of safeguarding and caretaking will know best, or at least that the child has to comply with it until they become adults.

So there's that aspect of it, just the general aspect of caretaking. We all know, and those of us who are female, or perhaps know more than those of us who are male, that girls have always projected onto themselves a kind of self-loathing, self-hating, and you can see that this is just another 21st century way in which that is being played out.

Now, particularly if we live in a society in which male bodies and male people are more valued and female bodies are less valued, now I think it's the level of discomfort that girls feel when they're going into their teenage years about their developing bodies. That requires a whole other, you know, we could talk about that for another hour, but I'm going to pull back from that.

What I want to say is to two things here. You know, there are many clinicians in gender identity development services for children who know that the girls who are going to them saying that they want to be boys have a whole host of problems attendant upon that, including… the girl, is often same sex attracted. 

So as long as living in a society in which, you know, there's a certain standard of female beauty and nearly every single girl feels that she doesn't comply with that, in fact hates her body because she doesn't comply with whatever the standard of beauty is. There's also a lot of homophobia and lesbophobia, so it's quite easy for a girl then to imagine that actually, “I have all of these uncomfortable feelings, lots of uncomfortable feelings about my body and what it is to be a woman,” and being objectified and embarrassed when you start developing breasts, and grown up men that should know better can't keep their eyes off you when you're walking down the street, and so on and so forth. So there's a whole host of reasons why young girls will be identifying as boys at the moment.

And it's outrageous. It's frankly a scandal of our society, in our society that we can see this as progressive.

But just one more thing. If, for example, a child said that they were – an anorexic child said, “I really am fat. I know that I'm gross. I'm carrying all of this flesh on me. And I know that when I look in the mirror, I'm repulsive.” If a parent went along with this and said, “yes, you really are, and I'm going to aid and abet you in not eating food,” this is equivalent in my view to a parent… because they have been sold a story, but it's equivalent to a parent who then feels that they have to say, “yes, yes, I accept that you really are trans and let me take you to a clinic now, which will give you hormone treatment to facilitate your belief that you are trans,” rather than the grownups, the clinicians, the parents, and everyone around the child seeing that the child has a psychological issue in the teenage years, with her body or his body that needs a careful… which will pull the child back from the self-belief.

Because what the child does, if the child is anorexic is moving on a pathway to becoming very, very ill. And the girl who's identifying as a boy is on a pathway to becoming very, very ill. Now, I have to say, and I really do believe it, I don't mean have to in a sense that it's political correctness that's making me say this, there are possibly some young people who have genuine gender dysphoria, which might be helped by helping facilitate that person down the road to transition. 

I think they must be so rare and have to be counterbalanced against this, what is a social movement. So I'm talking about a social movement whereby it's becoming accepted that girls can have been born in the wrong body, medically transitioning them is the correct thing to do when in fact… very first thing to do.

And it's an abdication of our responsibility as a society, and as clinicians actually, and as educators to be going along with this. I, you know, I predict that in 20 years’ time, or whenever, it might be two years hopefully, but it might take longer, we'll look back at this time and think, “how did society go along with this? How on earth did that happen?” But hey, you know, society goes along with all sorts of things and then reflects on it and retrospectively can't understand how we collectively accepted something. 

Sara: I find that when you speak, there's always some new thing that I'm thinking about and kind of bringing to mind. And one of the things that always makes me wonder a little bit is this whole, the core of this notion that in order to become your quote unquote true self, you have to change your name, never be referred to by sex-based pronouns, and change everything about your appearance, and remove your reproductive organs.

The core of that alone seems quite strange because one would think that in order to be one's true self, you would think that the least invasive thing would go hand in hand with such a narrative. 

Heather: Yes, absolutely. And now you've said that I'd like to add one more thing to it… happy, then, you know, you could make an argument that it's important to go along with it, but young people become increasingly self-absorbed, become increasingly focused down on this narrow thing, which is their gender identity. So that, as you say, everything gets pushed into this box, you know, whether you've misgendered them, their name, who's against them, who isn't against them, the kinds of people that they, you know, teenagers think that anybody else who doesn't completely go along with it is hateful and is against them.

And so it seems to me that it's a totally self-absorbing phenomenon that kids are getting into, which isn't bringing a light into their lives. It isn't enabling them to go out into the world and to embrace the world and to get stuck in there into all kinds of other issues. But to be focusing down on the self so intensely, which is what teenagers kind of do anyway, but you go through that phase, is to hold them back into that phase. And you know, there are adults who at 30 are still concerned about the trans thing and so and so forth, projecting out into the future, when you are actually then left with a body which is desexed and actually will cause you physical pain even in sexual activity. 

That again, I don't think the public are quite aware of, that young women who take testosterone often when they're having orgasmic feelings, get absolute pain in their uterus and so on, and that there are many issues involved in this that need to come out into the public domain that we need to discuss. But of course, if you have a hashtag, this is not up for debate, trans is not up for debate, then it's what actually happens is there is no debate. And anybody who's attempting for ethical reasons, for rational reasons, to have a debate then becomes targeted as the bigot. 

Sara: It is a very concerning thing, particularly I think because of its relationship with medicine and healthcare and what is supposedly, but as you know better, it's an objective and a rational way of looking at the world.

And I wanted to ask you, how do you think issues such as sexism and homophobia in medicine might influence the quote unquote scientific discourse regarding this particular practice, the transgendering of children? And would you have any sort of key messages for healthcare professionals to reflect on when it comes to clinical practice, especially with girls who identify as transgender or no longer as girls?

Heather: For a number of years now with clinicians who are very concerned about this. So there is nothing that I can say to them that they can't say for themselves. The point about that is they can't say it in public and they can't say it in the National Health Service. That's the point. As for the clinicians who are going along with it, there's nothing that I can say either, because they're fully sold on trans ideology.

So if I can go back to the first point that you made, which was, I think that what you were asking for is, is there some way in which, you know… and sexism is sort of determining the response of clinicians and clinics? Presumably you're talking about parents preferring their child to be trans rather than to be gay, or girls with dawning same sex attraction, preferring to be boys rather than girls.

But it's not just homophobia, that is just determining clinical practice. And I think it's really important that people get this. In a way it's now becoming quite a standard thing in discourse to say, “oh, you know, what's happening in gender… version of homophobia.” But the idea that without this, that what is going on in gender identity services would be scientific if it wasn't for these other pressures is rather quaint and naive.

And again, I say it's quaint and naive, not to disrespect anybody who goes along with… so firstly, any examination of medicine demonstrates that it is always a product of society. I'm not saying there's no science involved, but it's also a product of society. We just have to look at what is going on in the news at the moment about the vaginal mesh and the ways in which these objects have been inserted into women's bodies have caused huge amounts of pain. Won’t go into that story. That's another long story… that does involve big pharma, lots of money, lots of… and the insertion of the vagina mesh into women, by fully medically qualified people. And plus the idea that when women were complaining about it, that in some sense it was a psychological thing and that they were being in some sense irrational.

So the vaginal mesh in itself is symbolic. It just encompasses the whole range of ways in which medicine has… causes money, ideology, sexism, and so on and so forth. So, this is equally happening in gender identity clinics. So the idea that somehow the clinicians in gender identity clinics are somehow objective and removed from all of these different forces is clearly and painfully not the case.

But if we go even further into gender identity clinics, it's not medicine in that strict way. It concerns psychology. So when we get to psychology, that's even more fuzzy than any medical intervention, which has some basis in science and objectivity. So you can see how psychology is always, in one way or another, been very complicit with whatever society that psychology is a product of.

And I'm not saying that all psychologists go along with this. There are psychologists who have been very concerned about this, and who try to embed methodologies and so into psychology to mitigate against this. So I'm not disrespecting all psychology by any means, but at British Psychological Society… produce guidelines which are utterly shocking.

These are themselves a national scandal. We should all look at them. They're extremely partisan. They're written by clinicians who are themselves trans, or who are operating from a queer theory model. And they have managed through something called the Memorandum of Understanding, which itself was controversial, it sort of came into practice in 2017, I think, which forbids any other way of looking at trans other than directly affirming it. This is astonishing and lots of institutions and medical professionals and so on, gender identity development services, have signed up to this, have actually signed up to it. 

So the clinicians who object to what is going on, the clinicians I referred to recently who don't need me to tell them what's going on, because they tell me about the politics of what's going on, they are afraid to speak out. If you don't immediately affirm a child is trans, if you assume that there may be underlying issues going on for that child, like psychological, familial, sociological, that in itself can render you vulnerable as a clinician to being accused of wanting to convert the child.

So again, I just urge the public to become aware of these things and somehow or other this has to get out into the public domain. And we need to discuss, we need to have a discussion about the guidelines of the British Psychological Society and other Societies actually, in relation to the trans issue. So, the part, getting back to your original connection about, you know, this idea that it's homophobia or sexism that is driving the lack of objectivity of what's going on in gender medicine, I argue that the partisanship of psychology, as it now stands in combination with the drugs for children, which themselves are not scientifically tested and trialled, means that we have a big… that's carried out on children for the sake of ideology, and it's an absolute national scandal. 

Sara: I don't think anyone will be confused by your position there, Heather.

I think for me, the thing that I think I also mean by that question is not only necessarily what's going on now, but the sort of the legacy from where these ideas came from, in the first place, if that makes sense. So I'm thinking particularly of the roots from the kind of sexologists at the turn of the 20th century, and the kind of other ideas at the time that were floating around.

So, to me it just, it strikes me as being almost of a kind. And to me it seems like there's almost, it's like this same through line is still there, but what's happening now in some sense is it's almost getting repackaged. And I think the issue is there's a strange tension now between saying, “oh, it's a medical condition,” because that's the heritage of this thing, right? And in order to say that we're going to do some medical interventions, in some sense they need a diagnosis, right? Otherwise there's nothing there to treat, and then it's just a cosmetic intervention.

So in some sense, the activists need there to be some kind of condition in order for them to say, “we need this, or our lives are at stake,” for example. But at the same time, because they're coming at this from a sort of, you know, “we're all just born this way, there's nothing wrong with it, it shouldn't be stigmatised, it shouldn't be problematised, it shouldn't be pathologised.”

So it's like you're meeting these two different kind of ways of looking at the issue. And I think there's a tension there, even in how they are constructing this as a concept because of where we are now, particularly politically. 

Heather: I'd love to talk about the history of sexology and so on. I think it is connected, actually with what is going on at the moment.

But one interesting thing, if I can just pick you up on this is people who, the clinicians who promote the idea of inherent gender identity are not coming from that position actually. They may arrive back at it through the unintended consequences of all of this, coming together in one big conflictual soup, as it were. Their idea is that we need to get away from the disciplinary constrictions of sexology, of psychology, and so on, which have always pathologised people and made-up particular figures, which they then ostracise in comparison to the people who are the norm and on the right side of humanity. 

Interestingly, the further twist in the tail, is what I'm trying to explain, is that the people, the clinicians who are most pro the transing of children, imagine that they're actually, in transitioning children, that they're removing themselves from all of that. Thinking that they're depathologising trans, that they're allowing absolute diversity, that we can all be whoever we want to be.

Of course, the consequences of that, as feminists keep pointing out, is that what you do is you entrench sexism, you entrench homophobia and lesbophobia, you entrench stereotypes, and you entrench the disciplinary nature of gender. Rather than freeing us, it's getting more constrictive. Also, if I might add, what I'm always frightened about talking about, but it seems like it's going to come out of my mouth at the moment anyway, is the relationship between what is going on and the idea that came from sexology also, that in order to free ourselves from normative sexuality, what we have to do is depathologise all forms of sexuality. 

Now this is sitting alongside this, and I don't go there at the moment because I get my head chopped off enough. It's still on my shoulders at the moment somehow, but at one point I will probably go into this area and analyse this too. But, you know, until these quite simple conundrums like, do you know, sterilising young girls is not a particularly good thing to do in our society, until that's even established as the right ethical opposition to take. I won’t at the moment. Yeah.

Sara: Thank you so much for building on that, and for all the work that you're doing in this particular field because it always comes from a place of real compassion, I think, and a place from trying to find out the facts as they are, and doing careful analyses, because for me, a lot of the times, particular concepts and kind of sayings almost seem to get taken as read without any sort of question, well what is this actually? And is this actually correct? And so, that I think is so important and you know, particularly with everything that you've had to withstand in order to get this viewpoint out there and to even ask the question, I think is even more admirable that you keep going with this.

But you've published two books, which are quite brilliant, with Dr Michele Moore, and they're called Transgender Children and Young People: Born in Your Own Body, which came out in 2018, and Inventing Transgender Children and Young People in 2019. So on this subject, why do you think this area is so difficult to critically approach within the academic spheres, where technically speaking, everything should be free to examine, correct? And why is it so hard to, particularly for feminist women? 

Heather: Again, it's another long story, but you know, it is very difficult within academia, and it's difficult because the dominant trans narrative that trans is progressive and anyone who disagrees with this is a bigot and is some kind of right wing transphobe is firmly embedded in academia nowadays.

So I can't go into the history of that, I'll just tell you that it actually is, and it's, you know, Stonewall, for example, is in academia. It's got its feet under the table. It does training courses and so on, and it's not difficult to unpack how this has happened. But what I think, for the purposes of this interview, is more interesting to talk about is that some feminists are not admonished in the academy.

Some feminists are actually firmly embedded in academia, and who patrol and control the dominant narrative, and they gatekeep people like me from participating in academia. So it would be easy to think, you know, there are the academics over there who are doing this, and then there is these other feminists over here who are trying to get their voice heard, but who can't get their voice heard.

There is a feminist, an allegedly, I'm bound to say an allegedly feminist voice in academia, which is wholly supportive of trans ideology. So for example, I'm going to call them, for the purposes of this discussion, intersectional feminists, in contrast to gender critical feminists. Now intersectional feminists, again, you would think that this would be a great thing, of course. For those listeners who don't know, intersectional just means that when we think about women's position in society, we have to think of their class position, their ethnic position, and so on, and see how all the different forces interconnect and so forth.

This is patently the best way to begin to understand power and how it works, because we're all intersected in our lives. That should go without saying. But what intersectional feminism has become is, just as the way that there is an accusation, which isn't actually quite true, that in the 1970s white feminists were unconcerned about Black feminists, you go back to the 1970s and the discussions that were going on, and the arguments that were taking place, and it's simply not true. 

But let's just go along with the idea that feminism is a wholly white political movement and that white feminists don't want to contemplate the areas of concern other than their own bourgeois and middle class ones.

Let's assume that that might be right, for the moment. What then is said is that since what we do need is to include everybody under the banner of feminism, we need to include trans women under the banner of feminism too, and this is where it goes wrong. This is the crux point. You've allowed, literally, have allowed the men's rights movement, which I've talked about earlier, which I won't go back into, right into alleged feminism, and I find actually rejected as much by intersectional feminists as I have by male academics. That's just a fact of it. 

So academia plus the successful rhetoric of transactivism has coalesced together so that it's quite possible, and has happened, that a feminist academic might describe me is a TERF, a bigot, and advocate no-platforming me, not giving me a voice. It's now got to the position where it's uncontroversial in academia to say, as some feminists do, that men can give birth… controversial thing that's being progressive. Men can give birth. Because of course, if a woman who identifies as a man really is a man, just as, if a man who identifies as a woman really is a woman, then men can give birth. Therefore, it's become discriminatory to talk about women as birth givers.

So this now is cool and receives money from research bodies and so on. But it's controversial to say, as I do, that children go through psychological stages of maturation and best leave life altering decisions that will make you infertile till you're 18. So this is the state of academia as we have it at the moment.

Sara: Strange that it's come to this in some sense. 

Heather: It is. 

Sara: So I wanted to ask, there might be other women who are listening to you who completely agree with your position or much of it, but are really worried because they're really terrified of being labeled transphobic. What would you say to those women as someone who's been experienced in getting that label thrown at you?

Heather: Firstly, I want to say I absolutely understand that fear. It is not a pleasant experience, especially, as you know, when you know yourself that you are not transphobic. It's best to keep your head down, but we have to stick together. Nothing has ever changed, no big powerful movement as the trans movement will ever be halted, unless it meets the countervailing force and if people can bear it.

And now that it is becoming more possible to speak. I mean, at one point, literally, we were gagged in so many different ways. There were so many attempts to gag us. And of course, the fact that we have been gagged so much demonstrates how frightening it is that our words actually come out into the public domain.

You don't gag… you are not petrified that what they're going to say is undermine your position. Otherwise, you just let them speak. Who cares? So, you know, the more people stand together and refuse to be gagged, quite honestly, the better. And it's the only way that this men's rights movement, which is transactivism, is going to meet with a force that whacks it.

And that's what we need to do. It needs to be whacked. But one of the pains is that somebody like me doesn't have an alternative home. I, you know, I can't go to a right wing position, to have people hold my back, because I'm not, that's not where I'm coming from. I don't want traditional sexual and gender relationships to continue. I want us to question them. 

So people like me are particularly vulnerable because we don't have other terrain to stand on. Other than to hope that those people who are progressive, who do want freedom, to hold our backs. So it's really important that those people who belong largely to the same sort of political or progressive constituency, and I'm not talking about traditional Conservative and Labour here. So I'm not talking in that traditional way. I'm just talking broadly about those who would want the maximum freedom for society. It’s these people I need standing shoulder to shoulder with me. So if you want to come out and stand shoulder to shoulder with me, and others, this isn't hubris. There are many women who have spoken out, but we need more. I can think of very notable names of women who've spoken out and they're fantastic. So there is strength in numbers and we have to stick together. 

Sara: Solidarity and sisterhood, I suppose. 

Heather: Solidarity doesn't mean agreeing with everything that another sister says.

And this is becoming the problem I think within feminism, that we have to – unless that feminist has exactly the same stripes as us, we can't talk to that feminist. They have to think exactly as we do. Do you know? We are in a situation of David and Goliath here. We are David. We can't be that fussed about the nuances of different positions.

We have to really try to fight this battle. There'll be many others with each other, without being purist. I have actually been told by many people, different people, “you mustn't associate with that person because they say that,” or, “oh, don't say that because they're saying this.”

And I have to say, after a number of years, I took a strategy of, at the beginning it was quite painful, I thought about it quite a lot, and somebody was advising me not to associate myself with somebody. And, I thought it through and I thought the best thing that I can do is get on with it. Sooner or later, it'll all come out in the wash. And collectively, each one of us from all the different positions that we come from are fighting this battle. And let's just get on with it. 

Sara: Thank you so much, Heather. That makes a lot of sense. And I think it's a really salient point too. And something I think quite a few women grapple with actually, in terms of the kind of different nuances, like you say. 

But to get to my final question, I wanted to ask a little bit about what you're focusing on now, and how can women support your work, and where can they go to find out more? 

Heather: Well, what I'm currently doing, or have been doing is that I've been writing a book, which we'll be out in the next two or three months, I hope. It's called Transgender and Body Politics, and it's published by Spinifex.

And I have theorised, and I hope it's not too theoretical, is the relationship between the child's body, the woman's body, transgender, and body politics. That's what the book is about. So lockdown’s been great for me because I could concentrate on writing that. 

How women can support me is that, the main thing that I said in that book and that I've come to believe more strongly than I had if I hadn't believed it in the first place five years ago, when this movement was really taking off, the trans movement, is that we need to reassert the ownership of our own bodies again.

This is, in a way, what feminism has always been about… if the body, our ownership of our body and our fights to retain ownership of our body and to describe it in ways that we want to describe it, not in the way that men want to describe it. And by men, I don't mean all men. I mean, its the masculinist framework on which women's bodies have been interpreted. 

Again, I keep coming back to the thing of, the kind of holding my back thing while I say that because, you know, the trans lobby always jump in, “oh you're being biologically essentialist here, you think that because you have a uterus, this determines who you are as a woman.”

And this is so opposed to what I think, it's so opposite to what I think, but I think we need to brace ourselves for this accusation, and somehow find a way through. So, that's what I've been doing at the moment. 

I have got my eye on something else actually. And that is, I guess if you look back at the links in my own life… fascinated me throughout my career and personally, is the way that social movements, there are ways in which we have collective thought. And if you can begin to see the cracks in the collective thought, and the injustices that the collective thought perpetrates, always in the name of progressivism and social justice and so on. It's never, ever, presented as being nasty to people, you know, collective social thought is always presented as being for the social good.

And I get this frustration that people can't see it and I get a desire to expose it. It's a bit like picking up a stone saying, “look, right, underneath that stone, can you see all of that stuff that's going on, that's hidden from view?” So I guess that's why I ever did philosophy or social theory in the first place. So there's a trajectory here, going back in throughout my whole life, I haven't just suddenly stumbled into trans and found myself interested in all of this. It's an impulse that I have prior to that. So the thing that I think we are sleepwalking into now, I think that now that people are beginning to see, for themselves, what is the dangers of trans, now it's becoming more, we are more able to say it and the chances of losing one's job is becoming decreased, hopefully, by having a gender critical view. 

Now that the Transgender Identity Development services at the Tavistock is itself coming under fire, so that it's possible to say, “hang on a second, medically transitioning children is problematical,” and stuff is going on at Tavistock, you know, I've got hold of the stone with my colleague, Michele Moore, we've looked underneath it. Other people are looking underneath it now. 

Partly I think, do you know what? My work is done here. I'm putting the stone back onto that particular cess pit and I'm going to open another one. But, you know, I could just, start having a nice holidays and stop talking about, around the supper table, that my family would rather I shut up a bit and I could have a nice time. 

So I'm at this sort of, I'll see what the future is going to be

But, in relation to getting in contact with me, my Twitter address is @brunskell-evans and my website address is, if I can remember it, www.heather-brunskell-evans.co.uk.

Sara: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Heather. And thank you for taking the time to speak with us, honestly, for just so generously doing all of this, because you give so much I think of yourself in all aspects of this work. And then to kind of come and speak to us about what it is that you found and parting some of that knowledge, for us and for our listeners is really, is incredible. So thank you, and take care of yourself please, . 

Heather: Thank you.