Eight years ago, Sophie Grace Chappell came out as the UK’s first trans philosopher. She has since been joined by Matthew Cull at Edinburgh and says “I know of other people who are bubbling under but haven’t made a public move yet.” But she believes it has become harder to come out since she transitioned. “The whole environment for being transgender looked a lot more favourable in 2014 than it does now.”
“We have a society at large where a lot of frankly very transphobic stuff has been normalised,” says Chappell. “It’s also a problem that a lot of the time people see this as a debate with two sides in a way that they wouldn’t see debates that are comparable about race or being gay.”
On the other side of that debate are gender-critical feminists (disparagingly called “Terfs”—trans-exclusionary radical feminists) who argue that in many contexts our biological sex matters more than our gender identity, which they argue is in any case a nebulous concept.
Chappell and her allies consider many gender-critical views to be transphobic. Nonetheless, she insists that “there are no questions that I refuse to engage with.” It’s the questioners she avoids, when she judges that they’re not “in good faith” or “getting it.”
So what are the things that gender-critical feminists say which Chappell believes shows they’re not listening? “I’ll give you three examples. First of all, trans women—they don’t normally talk about trans men in this context—are sexual predators, a threat to women’s safety. Secondly, there’s no such thing as a trans kid, and thirdly, trans people are delusional.”
I put it to Chappell that the people saying such things are not the more serious gender-critical feminists. For example, in her recent book Material Girls, Kathleen Stock explicitly rejected the idea that all or most trans women are predators.
Chappell would prefer to be fighting for women’s rights against the patriarchy
“There can sometimes be inconsistencies between people’s comments on social media and what they put in their books, and often it’s not actually very clear which of two conflicting positions people really take,” she responds, at pains to avoid naming names. “You also find prominent people in that ideological neck of the woods who are quite happy, for example, to give approbation to people on social media who one would think of as much more violent activists, who say things like: ‘We should have guards with guns in women’s loos to keep the “transes” out.’”
In her forthcoming book, Trans Figured, Chappell—perhaps surprisingly for a philosopher—explicitly says she doesn’t have a theory of gender or a gender ideology. Indeed, the idea that to be trans is to be in the grip of an ideology is one of the zombie tropes Chappell tires of refuting. Experience, not theory, tells us that to be trans feels something like: “I was born with a body which was shaped this way, under a set of social assumptions about who I am which go with having a body shaped that way, and I want to live in a body which isn’t shaped that way and not to have the expectations that go with the socialised sex status imposed upon me,” explains Chappell.
She argues that several beliefs—including the promotion of a rigid gender ideology, something widely attributed to trans people—are marginal or even fictional within the trans community. For instance, trans activists have been accused of attacking lesbians who won’t date trans women. But Chappell says she’s never heard a trans person call that preference transphobic—and it would be “utterly ridiculous.”
Chappell would prefer to be on the same side as the gender-critical feminists, fighting for women’s rights against the patriarchy. “I don’t see why we shouldn’t agree some targets and work together towards those targets,” she says, such as resisting the attack on bodily autonomy represented by the overturning of Roe v Wade. Given the mistrust and animosity on both sides, however, such a united front looks distant.
