Sex strikes back

The feminist critique of ‘gender identity’ is well known, but this novel concept has also been challenged by some gays, lesbians and even transgender people themselves

Rogers Brubaker

The gay and lesbian critique

There is no recognized body of “gender-critical” gay and lesbian writing analogous to gender-critical feminism. Like gender-critical feminism within the broader feminist sphere, the gender-critical stance is a minority view among gay men and lesbians, and one that tends to be held by an older generation. But several elements of a critique articulated by some gay men and lesbians have coalesced in recent years, and there are signs that the critique is gathering momentum.

The critique emerged in the context of a sharp pivot toward emphasizing trans rights by major LGBT organizations—GLAAD and HRC in the US and Stonewall in the UK—after marriage equality was achieved.¹ The pivot was not just toward trans rights, but toward a specific version of trans rights, premised on the primacy of gender identity over sex.² This move left some gay men and lesbians feeling unrepresented by these organizations;³ in the UK, it led to the establishment of a competing organization, the LGB Alliance.

Like the feminist critique, the critique developed by gay men and lesbians insists on the importance of sex. But its concern with sex is focused on the connection between sex and sexuality. Homosexuality, on this account, is defined by sex: it is a matter of same-sex attraction, not same-gender attraction. These critics therefore strongly reject claims that lesbians, for example, are transphobic if they are not sexually attracted to trans women with male genitalia. More fundamentally, they argue that the displacement of sex by gender identity—what Allan Stratton has called “gender supremacism”—threatens the foundations of homosexuality as a social practice, since the very existence of homosexuality (or bisexuality) as an intelligible category depends on people identifying themselves and their potential sexual partners by sex.⁴

The insistence on the importance of sex has led some gay and lesbian critics to challenge the widely held assumption, encoded in the LGBT acronym and its more elaborate offshoots, that all forms of sexual and gender diversity belong together and form the basis for a shared politics. They suggest that sexual orientation and gender identity are not always complementary modes of diversity that coexist happily under the rainbow flag; they may instead be competing ways of interpreting difference and defining social reality.⁵

More specifically, these critics argue that the focus on gender identity and the devaluation of sex may lead some gay people to redefine themselves as trans or nonbinary. Long-standing fears of “butch flight” to the newly available identity of trans man, going back to the 1990s, have nourished a broader concern about the undermining of “lesbian” itself as a category in a context in which many young people, particularly natal females, are exploring and adopting gender identities other than “woman.”⁶

But the critics’ main concern is with children and adolescents. They argue that instruction in gender identity, formal and informal, may contribute to producing the felt incongruence between gender identity and natal sex that it claims simply to be describing and recognizing. The hyper-available language of gender identity, that is, may transform rather than simply reveal the self-understandings of children and adolescents.

By demoting sex to “sex assigned at birth,” positing the existence of an internal gender identity to which only the individual concerned has access, investing this posited gender identity with the dignity of authenticity and true selfhood, and inviting young people to consult their feelings to determine whether their gender identity is or is not congruent with their “sex assigned at birth,” instruction in gender identity offers gender-nonconforming young people a potent new schema of sense-making that may alter the way they understand themselves and their predicaments.

It may lead some gender-atypical children who would have grown up to be gay adults—as research shows is often the case⁷ with gender-nonconforming children—to instead interpret their gender-atypical behavior or preferences as a sign of a gender identity that is not aligned with their sex, and in some cases to be placed on a pathway toward social and medical transition. Many older gay observers have noted that, had they grown up in today’s environment, they might well have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, taken puberty blockers, and gone on to transition.⁸

Central to the critique is the concern that homophobia—in young people themselves, in their familial and social milieus, and in the wider cultural or political environment—may encourage adolescents troubled by their same-sex attractions to consider the possibility that their gender identity might differ from their natal sex.⁹

Seizing on this possibility, which has become much more culturally available and socially legitimate for adolescents in the last decade or so, especially in certain milieus, allows them to reinterpret their same-sex desires as heterosexual.¹⁰ Yet as Andrew Sullivan has argued, with respect to boys with same-sex attractions, this interpretive reframing is troublingly akin to “the deepest, oldest homophobic trope: that gay boys aren’t really boys.”¹¹ That homophobia plays a part in such reinterpretations is no mere theoretical possibility. Most adolescents referred to gender identity clinics report same-sex desires.¹² And one clinician who resigned from the Gender Identity Development Service of the London Tavistock clinic reported that “it feels like conversion therapy for gay children” and that children frequently “started identifying as trans after months of horrendous bullying for being gay.”¹³

The transgender critique

Perhaps more surprisingly, the institutionalization of gender identity has also been criticized by some transgender people. Just as some feminists deny that gender identity alone makes one a woman, some transgender critics deny that gender identity alone makes one transgender. They suggest that defining transgender solely or primarily in terms of how one identifies, without any reference to dysphoria or to transition, has stretched the category to the point of meaninglessness. Debbie Hayton, for example, has criticized the focus on gender identity as a shift from observable forms of doing—specifically, transitioning—to an unobservable state of being.¹⁴

Writing from a very different perspective, Kadji Amin has similarly challenged the definition of transgender “as a matter of ‘personal identity’ alone.” In the context of a sharp critique of “nonbinary” as a socially empty category that, for some, serves primarily as a political signifier, Amin argues that “what is socially relevant is transition, ... not identification.”¹⁵ Robin Dembroff, too, defines transgender in terms of “costly and willful gender deviance,” and rejects as overinclusive definitions that appeal simply to gender identity or gender nonconformity.¹⁶

Some are concerned, moreover, that the focus on gender identity may threaten the broad public recognition and rights gained in recent decades by transgender people. On this view, that recognition and those rights rest implicitly on an understanding that transgender is a relatively rare phenomenon, grounded in gender dysphoria so severe that it impels a small minority to embark on risky and costly projects of transition. Some transgender people therefore oppose the teaching of gender identity in schools. As Brianna Wu put it, “no one needed to tell me I wanted to be a girl when I was five years old. It’s all I could think about. So, why ... are we trying to inculcate these children into this?” Doing so “is tailor-made to turn parents against us.”¹⁷

Divorcing gender identity from dysphoria and transition, and understanding it as a mere subjective feeling, likewise risks undermining the rationale for public recognition and rights. Some transgender people therefore join the feminist and gay and lesbian critiques in opposing self-identification as the sole criterion of access to sex-segregated spaces.¹⁸ As Debbie Hayton has argued, “there was widespread acceptance of transsexuals in women’s spaces when I transitioned in 2012. But the assumption was that you’d changed your body or were going to, and this was a response to a medical condition. Moving it from a medical to a social issue has damaged our acceptance.”¹⁹ Others, however, see this kind of argument as seeking to uphold exclusionary “transnormative” criteria about the “right way” to be trans.²⁰

Like feminist and gay and lesbian critics of gender identity, a number of transgender critics also insist on the reality and importance of biological sex. They do so because they understand themselves and their transgender (or as some prefer to say: transsexual) trajectories in relation to their sex. Not in relation to their “sex assigned at birth,” but to their sex, full stop.²¹ They take the material and biological reality of sex seriously precisely because they have had to struggle with it all their lives.²²

The distinction between sex and gender may have been famously pronounced illusory by Judith Butler, for whom sex is “as culturally constructed as gender” and “will be shown to have been gender all along.”²³ But that distinction—and the material reality of sex—remains indispensable to the self-understanding of many transgender people, especially those who consider themselves transsexuals. The insistence on the material biological reality of sex recalls arguments of the 1990s and 2000s between transsexuals, who did not “seek to queer or destabilize categories of gender but to successfully embody them,” and queer theorists, who celebrated transgression, fluidity, the destabilization of categories, and the proliferation of gender identities between and beyond the binary pair.²⁴

Most transgender critics do not reject the idea of gender identity per se; that idea remains central to their self-understanding. What they challenge is a fully disembodied understanding of gender identity, defined without relation to the material reality of sex, the suffering of dysphoria, or the experience of transition. They fear that such a free-floating understanding of gender identity, unmoored from the coordinates of binary sex and the narratives of dysphoria-driven transition that made the transgender phenomenon intelligible to a broad public and built remarkable public support for transgender people, may now be weakening that understanding and support.

Some transgender critics, however, have directly challenged the category “gender identity” itself; they see it as detrimental to trans politics. For Andrea Long Chu, “transition expresses not the truth of an identity but the force of a desire ... [It is] a matter not of who one is, but of what one wants.”²⁵ She argues that the “freedom of sex”—the right to alter aspects of one’s sexual biology—should not depend on gender identity, a concept “clumsily adapted from psychiatry.”²⁶ And Amin has scathingly criticized the centrality of “provincially Western” understandings of gender identity to trans politics—as well as the “neoliberal universalization of identity as the basis of all politics.”²⁷

***

These critiques [including the more familiar feminist critique, not included in this extract] differ in emphasis and argument, but they converge in challenging four main ideas about gender identity. These ideas—that it should always be affirmed; that it should govern access to sex-segregated spaces and activities; that it is more fundamental than sex; and that it is universal and foundational for selfhood—comprise the core presuppositions of the institutionalization of gender identity in medicine, law, data-gathering, and education. The fact that these ideas have come under critique from some feminists, some gay men and lesbians, and even some transgender people makes clear that the controversies analyzed in this chapter, notwithstanding their blatant instrumentalization by the right, cannot be adequately understood solely through a left–right lens.

This is an extract from Rogers Brubaker’s new book, Gender Identity: The Career of a Category, published by Polity.

1. McCrea, The End of the Gay Rights Revolution, 85ff. For evidence of the pivot from annual reports of the major LGBT organizations, see Biggs, “LGBT Facts and Figures.”

2. Best, “Why I Can’t Trust Stonewall Any More”; Best, “Stonewall’s Greatest Betrayal”; Stratton, “The ‘Gender Supremacist’ Threat to the Progressive Alliance.”

3. Paul, “The Growing Divide in the Rainbow Coalition.” See also the opinion piece by Matthew Parris, one of the founders of Stonewall, “Stonewall Should Stay Out of Trans Rights War.”

4. Stratton, “The ‘Gender Supremacist’ Threat to the Progressive Alliance”; Stratton, “Rescuing the Radicalized Discourse on Sex and Gender”; Sullivan, “The Nature of Sex”; Stock, Material Girls, 89–98; Walker, “The Label Wars Are Over”.

5. Sullivan, “Gay and Lesbian Independence Day”; Wintemute, Transgender Rights vs. Women’s Rights, 158–66. On the contingent and often fractured alliance between gay and lesbian groups and trans groups, see George, “The LGBT Disconnect.”

6. On “butch flight,” see Mackay, “Always Endangered, Never Extinct”; on the “border wars” between butch lesbians and trans men, see Halberstam, “Transgender Butch”; on the disappearing lesbian, see Herzog, “Where Have All the Lesbians Gone?”; on the exit of young people, natal females in particular, from conventional binary gender categories, see Brubaker, “Exit, Voice, and Gender,” 157ff. For a critique of concerns about “lesbian erasure,” see Thurlow, “Sisters, It’s Been a While!”

7. Biggs, “The Dutch Protocol for Juvenile Transsexuals,” 352.

8. Appel, “Homophobia in Drag”; Sullivan, “Gay and Lesbian Independence Day.”

9. As some have noted in this connection, while Iran criminalizes homosexuality, it allows transsexuality, which is proposed by some “legal and medical authorities ... as a religio-legally sanctioned option for heteronormalizing people with same-sex desires and practices” (Najmabadi, “Verdicts of Science, Rulings of Faith: Transgender/Sexuality in Contemporary Iran.”)

10. Soh, “The Unspoken Homophobia Propelling the Transgender Movement in Children.”

11. Sullivan, “Gay and Lesbian Independence Day.”

12. Cass, Independent Review of Gender Identity Services, 118.

13. Bannerman, “It Feels like Conversion Therapy for Gay Children, Say Clinicians.”

14. Hayton, Transsexual Apostate, 57–8, 105–7.

15. Amin, “We Are All Nonbinary,” 113, 115, emphasis in the original.

16. Dembroff, “Reimagining Transgender.”

17. Quoted on “The Dishcast,” December 27, 2024, at 28:04.

18. Mroz, “Take It from a Trans Person: Corbyn Is Wrong About Self-ID”; Harrison et al., “Standing up for Transsexual Rights.”

19. Quoted in Stratton, “Rescuing the Radicalized Discourse”; see also Hayton, Transsexual Apostate, 205–11.

20. Armitage, “Explaining Backlash,” 26.

21. Chu, “The Right to Change Sex,” notes that the phrase “sex assigned at birth” “unhelpfully obscures the very biological processes that many people have a right to change.”

22. As Todd Whitworth, “I Have Gender Dysphoria,” put it, “I am happy with the fact that I walk through the world being perceived as male. However, biology reminds me every day that I’m not.” Or again Hayton, “I May Have Gender Dysphoria”: “As I know better than most, sex is immutable. I may have transitioned socially, medically and surgically, but I am as male now as I was the day I was born.”

23. Butler, Gender Trouble, 7, 8.

24. Elliot, “Engaging Trans Debates on Gender Variance,” 11. Elliot provides a lucid analysis of the transsexual critique of queer theory and transgender studies—developed by transsexual scholars such as Namaste, Sex Change, Social Change; Prosser, Second Skins; and Rubin, “Phenomenology as Method in Trans Studies”—and the (in Elliot’s view) inadequate response of queer and transgender scholars (including Butler) to that critique. While the spectacular rise of the term “transgender” since the 1990s pushed the older term “transsexual” to the margins, there is evidence of its return or at least of its resilience.

25. Chu, “On Liking Women,” emphasis in the original. Hayton, “I May Have Gender Dysphoria,” makes a similar point: “gender dysphoria is a real condition. I know, because I have it: the feeling that my male biology is at odds with my desire to have a female body. But I don’t have to invent some mystical spiritual force called gender identity to explain it.” For a fuller transsexual critique of the notion of gender identity, see Hayton, Transsexual Apostate.

26. Chu, “The Right to Change Sex.”

27. “If Butler wrote Gender Trouble as a critique of the ascription of an interior core where there was nothing but compelled performances of social ideals of gender, ... the fictive core of gender identity has taken on a life of its own. Gender identity is envisioned not as derivative of but as autonomous from the social, to the extent that it may entirely contradict one’s actual gender performances ... Today, ‘gender identity’ references a core selfhood that requires no expression, no embodiment, and no commonality—in the case of some of the microidentities spreading on the internet—with genders as they are lived by others in the world. In this sense, contemporary gender identity is the apotheosis of the liberal Western fantasy of self-determining ‘autological’ selfhood” (Amin, “We Are All Nonbinary,” 115–16, emphasis added).