The future of the Labour Party hangs in the balance. Its fourth consecutive defeat has finally severed its relationship with its traditional core vote in the ex-industrial regions of the North and Midlands. It drifts, unmoored from its old national coalition and without a new one to replace it. The leadership contest, lacking spark and barely willing to acknowledge the scale of its crisis, has failed to ignite much interest. The hustings format rendered it unwatchable. But this handicap aside, it has had nothing to say about how the party can redefine itself and forge a new coalition, bar repeating current Labour orthodoxies. What exactly is the purpose of the Labour Party in 2020 and the coming new period?

An answer came when the five women candidates signed up to the pledges drawn up by the small Labour Campaign for Trans Rights. For a brief moment the contest showed clarity and a sense of moral purpose about Labour’s mission. Diversity is its defining value, inspired by the belief that every individual has the right to be their own true and authentic self. Identity is a struggle between self- definition and being defined by more powerful others in a negative way. The Labour Party is on the side of the oppressed and marginalised.

This kind of radical liberalism has entered deep into modern consciousness. The philosopher Charles Taylor describes it as a new phenomenon in which we are called upon to be true to ourselves and to seek our own self-fulfilment.1 But Taylor warns that defining one’s own identity crucially depends on our relations with others. It has to be won through exchange and recognition. It is only intelligible to others if it is part of shared ordinary human understanding and the ordinary life of family, work and love. Disconnected from this realm identity politics is unconstrained by the reciprocity that holds a society together and quickly descends into ideological fantasy.

A candidate argues on national TV that babies are born without a sex. Another puts forward the view that a man who rapes a woman and then self-identifies as a woman should have his chosen gender respected and be sent to a woman’s prison. Those who argue back are shamed into silence by the unsubstantiated claim of high levels of suicide amongst trans people. Each candidate repeats the slogan transwomen are women and transmen are men as if it is an unquestionable truth. Who exactly is transgender? What constitutes a man or a woman? Nobody is quite clear, least of all the candidates themselves.

The feminist theorist Judith Butler is an early proponent of the postmodern upending of normative truth claims. Societies, she claims, do not begin with biologically sexed bodies and produce gender. They begin with gender and impose it on human bodies. Male and female bodies are not ineradicable biological categories but linguistic, gendered artefacts and socially constructed behaviours. Male human beings can become female human beings and female male through an act of self-identification.

Anne Fausto Sterling another leading advocate who writes on biology and gender development  explains how gender/sex and sexual orientation are complex dynamic systems assembled from bodily, cultural and intersubjective subsystems. Social and cultural effects shape the physiology of the biological body. They reach deep into our nervous systems and physiology. Like Butler she does not believe that human sexual development is dichotomous but falls on a continuum. ‘The two-sex system embedded in our society is not adequate to encompass the full spectrum of the human sexed body’. Butler confirms her belief that it is polymorphous:

“I see no problem with women having a penis, and men having a vagina. People can have whatever primary characteristics they have (whether given or acquired) and that does not necessarily imply what gender they will be, or want to be.”

The validity of this argument depends on gender and sex being made interchangeable terms. One must dismiss the fact that a newborn’s reproductive anatomy is unambiguously male or female 99.98% of the time as incidental to gender identity. One must reject the idea that these two anatomies have an evolutionary function to aid the reproduction of the human species. And one must agree that the claims of biology are not scientific truths, and nor are the categories of male and female. Instead they are constituted in social relations and exist across a spectrum. Sex difference originates in subjective identity - an inner feeling about who and what we are  - not objective biology. The sex of a new born cannot be observed as a biological fact, nor its future sex/gender determined. Instead it is assigned. The phrase is increasingly used by media and government but was only ever used in the very small number of cases of intersex births when an infant’s genitalia is indeterminate.

There is no scientific basis for these views. They amount to a pseudoscience in which evidence is sought to confirm an ideology rather than to question its veracity.

Each signatory to the pledges commits to the view that there is no material conflict between trans rights and women’s rights. It overlooks the biological sex based rights of the 2010 Equality Act which does distinguish between the rights of transwomen and women. No distinction is made between the demands for trans rights and the identity politics of trans liberation and its pseudoscientific ideas. Consequently the pledges also demand that those who reject the view that transwomen are women are guilty of transphobia and should be expelled from the Labour Party. Guilty parties are named.

Like other forms of identity politics, the language of its more extreme advocates has the same mix of moral self-righteousness and ideological certainty. Scientific facts that compromise ideology are dismissed. Lived, embodied experience is transmogrified into an ideological social construction and there is only one correct interpretation. All who doubt it or have questions are declared hostile and accused of hate crime. The Mayor of London tweets his support. A new Labour MP calls on the party to educate the ignorant. Those who do not respond to education and still do not believe transwomen are women should also be expelled.

The social theorist Christopher Lasch warned that this kind of unconstrained identity politics leads to a culture of narcissism in which ‘politics degenerates into a struggle not for social change but for self-realisation’.2 Far from it being an emancipation from the repressive conditions of the past it unwittingly supports the status quo. The recent Starbucks campaign WhatsYourName organised with the trans charity Mermaids is an example of how identity politics is used as a corporate promotional vehicle. A poignant and award winning ad follows a young teenager as he transitions from being a girl called Jemma to the moment when he proclaims himself to a Starbucks barista as James. The claim being made is that Starbucks enables young people who are transitioning to try out their new names in public.

In the culture of capitalism the desire for self-realisation and an authentic life is a productive source of market value. Identity politics becomes the singular pursuit of self-interest detached from social obligations. The only thing that has validity is one’s own self-engendered consensus immune from all external criticism. There is no constraint on the pursuit of self-realisation except the community one belongs to. It is only a short step to unreason and pseudoscience, and to the use of threats, physical intimidation and denunciation against those who disagree with you.

Taylor repeats his caution that the ethic of self-realisation might be about one’s own identity and self-esteem but it involves the right of everyone to achieve their own unique way of being human. ‘The limit on anyone’s self-fulfilment must be the safeguarding of an equal chance at this fulfilment for others’.3 To dispute this right in others is to fail to live within its own terms.

Labour has to address social conflicts and the inequalities of power with a politics of mutual recognition conducted through dialogue in a democratic community of equals. Political leadership involves acquiring the recognised authority to mark out the boundaries of acceptable behaviour and broker a common good between conflicting interests. Those candidates who signed the pledges lost claim to that authority and so also to trust and political leadership.

The pledges have done no favours to trans-people who have been cast into the toxicity of identity politics and a public spat over their existence. Society has become far more tolerant of non-conforming gender identities but the interchanging of biological sex and social gender is medicalising difference, offering simplistic solutions to adolescent struggles over sexuality, reinforcing gender stereotypes and closing down the plurality of gender expressions. And what is causing the extraordinary and rapid increase in adolescent girls attending GIDS clinics who want to transition to being boys? Adolescent girls are an acutely sensitive measure of how society represents and treats the female body and sexuality.

 The majority of those wanting to transition, though, are born male and the political demands of trans liberation and self-identification do not just impact on sex based rights, women’s sport, and single sex spaces won by women, but more fundamentally they initiate a struggle over women’s bodies and what being a woman means. It is a struggle that many women feel is all the more threatening because of the involvement of powerful lobby and corporate interests.

The two tangible demands of trans activists are reform of the  Gender Recognition Act to allow for self-identification and the replacement of the phrase ‘gender reassignment’ with ‘gender identity’ in the Equality Act . Taken together they would significantly expand the category of transgender to include a wide variety of gender non-conforming males, all able to self-identify as women. Women’s groups oppose both measures. The Government has halted the first and the second is not being discussed. However this has not stopped attempts to further both by corporate and lobby groups. 

 Labour has lost its historical purpose. Adopting the radical liberalism of identity politics will only further marginalise it and hasten its decline. There are thoughtful people in the trans community not given to liberation politics to advise Labour on the rights and wellbeing of trans people to which the party is committed. Labour has to recover its purpose as the party of the labour interest and the common good which speaks with the voice of reason for the whole nation and the ordinary life of its people. The response to the trans rights pledges in the leadership contest reveals that it does not yet possess either this voice nor the necessary authority. The trans issue is not peripheral. It exposes the operation of political power in a society still dominated by men and we must settle it in both a just and reciprocal manner.

References 

1.  Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, Harvard University Press, 1997

2.  Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, Abacus, 1988, p28

3.   Charles Taylor p45