‘Battle lines have been drawn and any constructive dialogue seems to be impossible.” So runs the opening line of the very carefully scripted narration of Gender Wars, a documentary about one of the most polarising, saddening, enraging and toxic debates of our time. Channel 4 has bitten the bullet and is the first, I think, to produce a programme giving voice to both sides of what is usually called “the trans issue”. However, the first problem it faces is that “the trans issue” is actually about 400 issues packed into one, which has partly contributed to the endless difficulties in approaching, let alone resolving, it.
Wisely, Gender Wars does not try to cover everything. It looks at the phrase “trans women are women” and the ramifications, if it is to be taken not as a catchy slogan, embodying the idea that everyone should be allowed to dress, present and live as they choose, but as literal truth and the central plank of an increasingly popular and powerful ideology.
We hear from speakers from the “gender critical” side: people who believe biological sex is binary, fixed and immutable, and that allowing anyone to identify out of one and into another – but particularly from the male class into the female, with attendant rights to enter women’s changing rooms, toilets, refuges and rape crisis centres – is problematic and to be resisted. Their main representative is Dr Kathleen Stock, who had to resign as a university professor after students protested over her presence as a gender-critical feminist who questioned whether transgender women could properly represent those born female, given their “different biologies and social histories”. Her experience also raises wide questions about free speech and academic/managerial responsibility.
We hear from speakers from the other side, such as Prof Stephen Whittle, a trans man who has been involved with the fight for trans recognition from its earliest years (“We were the dirt people wiped off their shoe”), who say that trans people are no threat to anyone and that the gender-critical movement is unnecessary and misguided. We also hear from younger people, such as Kass, who is non-binary and believes Stock and her ilk are simply bigoted and that any circumscription of their ability to identify however they see fit is an assault on their rights. And we hear from Katy Jon Went, a trans woman and campaigner for dialogue and compromise between the two positions: “Moderates in both camps are the only hope for social coexistence.”
As the first in what probably needs to be several hundred granular series of programmes covering every aspect of the issue at various levels of accessibility, Gender Wars can hardly be criticised for spending most of its hour having people set out their stalls. But it does mean that moments that cry out for further questioning or unpacking go unquestioned and unpacked.
For example, when Stock and the veteran women’s rights campaigner Julie Bindel note their concerns that making it legally and socially possible for men to enter women’s single sex spaces makes it easier, for those inclined, to prey on the occupants, Dr Finn Mackay (a senior lecturer in sociology) responds by saying that predatory men don’t need “to transition to live as trans women in order to be sexually violent to women and children. Sadly, that is a daily occurrence.” But how does this fit with the claim that you do not need to transition in any more significant (ie physical) way than saying you identify as a woman? And is removing one of the few remaining safeguards against a common crime ever a good response to the existence of a common crime?
By the end of Gender Wars, however, I suspect the average viewer will be left with even more questions, due to the number of issues raised, rather than the number of responses left hanging. Future documentaries could drill down into any of the points made, or move on to new aspects: such as male and female sportspeople, transitioning children, how gender stereotypes harm us all, how much violence of different kinds is suffered by trans people.
If there is one issue that continues the search for common ground between those who argue for each side, it is surely male violence and the damage it does, and always has done, to society. If we imagine a world in which men no longer pose an endemic threat to women, then most, if not all of these problems fall away, don’t they? If women, trans women and trans men don’t have this to fear – well, wouldn’t that be something? Wouldn’t that be different? Perhaps if we asked that always illuminating question – what would the enemy least like us to do? – we could finally start getting some useful answers.
Gender Wars is on Channel 4.
