Image: Unsplash and Michele Wales. https://unsplash.com/@mawales
THIS BOOK IS a very important one in the transgender ‘debate’. That I put the word in quotes is deliberate because what passes for debate about ‘trans issues’ is too often characterised, on both sides, by gross disinformation that is hard to decipher.
This often leads to diatribe and hate speech rather than ‘agreeing-to-differ’ dialogue. It seems that one cannot be either pro or anti-trans without incurring the wrath of someone. And good quality evidence in the meantime gets squashed out or ignored.
As a father of a trans daughter, this is not just a story of intellectual interest against the background of a vicious cancel-culture. It involves real people struggling with life-changing decisions, with those involved often not knowing whom to turn to for help and advice – professional, pastoral or personal. It’s surely not surprising that tentative toe-dipping into information and resources are so often responded to with a hasty retreat, and disgust that some people can be so nasty.
This review has been written in the wake the closure of the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the Tavistock Clinic and the recent media’s reporting of the Cass Review (NHS England’s ‘Independent review of gender identity services for children and young people’, published April 2024). The reasons for the closure of GIDS at Tavistock, and whether the subsequent Cass Review is biased against trans, are complex, involving litigation, whistle-blowing, concerns about the long-term effects of so-called puberty-blocking medication, and so on. Unless one is an expert on all things to do with the ‘gender agenda’, seeing a way as a layperson through the maze of different opinions on trans is difficult, to say the least. People are labelled as pro or anti, rather than lauded as dispellers of myth and misinformation.
The writer of the Cass Review, Hilary Cass herself, said this to The Times newspaper:
I have been really frustrated by the criticisms, because it is straight disinformation. It is completely inaccurate. It started the day before the report came out when an influencer posted a picture of a list of papers that were apparently rejected because they were not randomised control trials. That list has absolutely nothing to do with either our report or any of the papers.
If one were only to read the reactionary press and social media outlets, one would think that Cass has succumbed to the trans lobbyists. Clearly there is more to this than meets the eye. The issue has also sparked the resignation of a respected Guardian journalist, Hadley Freeman, for allegedly being blocked from writing about the subject of trans by her senior management. And so on – and on.
The clarity of this book should help, and the more I read of this author, the more I warmed to her and her careful arguments. As a father to a transgender woman, I have been down a deep rabbit hole, grappling with complex social and medical issues, and trying to make sense of exaggeration, misinformation and wrong-headed ideology. Having said that, this is small beer for me, compared with what my daughter has had to endure. In my reading on this, there are a few books and articles that I would strongly recommend, and this is one of them.
The author of Trans Figured is a renowned professor of philosophy. As an expert on ethics, she uses her professional skills effectively. Inevitably, she has had more than her fair share of abuse, but she responds to these with grace and poise. One of the frequent attacks on those who are arguing for trans rights is that they are simply following an ideology-fuelled agenda. But of the anti-trans brigade, Chappell says that:
A lot of the time, despite their deployment of the rhetoric of reality, they are doing the exact opposite; they are defending their own ideology against reality.
She goes on:
There is also, all over the place on the Internet, a whole slew of much more extreme silencing falsehoods: that transgender people are delusional; that we are mentally ill; that we are liars or frauds, deceptive or self-deceptive; imposters, perverts, sexual predators, paedophiles, parasites, ‘doing woman-face’, stooges of some massive big-pharma Jewish conspiracy or of a ‘cultural Marxist’ campaign to destroy the family, or masculinity, or Western culture, or something – or … that trans people or trans kids simply don’t exist at all.”
Her conclusion?
Absurd as these claims are there is a burgeoning industry of trans exclusionary voices online that are very happy to keep pumping them out the whole time along of course with much activity that is merely insulting and abusive … Given all this manifestly terrible behaviour, perhaps people on that side of the debate who have any sense of shame might be a little less assertive about the claim that they are defending ‘reality’ against ‘ideology’.
The reality is that trans people – and their close friends and family – exist, and they are buffeted by some awful arguments by those who clearly do not care about them and what ‘gender dysphoria’ means to them on a practical day-to-day basis.
Chappell’s book, arguably, needs to be read alongside others – but there is a problem here. Because the debate is so toxic, reading unbiased reviews of the literature available is problematic. Whom and what do you trust to tell you what is going to be useful and what is going to be part of the ongoing ire? When a brief Google search about trans throws up organisations who are campaigning against or for trans, the agony of those actively undergoing transition and wanting to be kept out of the ‘debate’ is understandable.
One would hope that Christian voices, with a focus on compassion and pastoral concern, could at least be trusted. But many of these have heavy biases and agendas which have more to do with idealism than transparent debate or pastoral care. There has been much non-inclusive rhetoric during the recent debate about whether the Church of England is right to use liturgy that is inclusive of gay orientations. Such arguments are being used repeatedly – and unthinkingly – concerning trans people.
A criticism of the book is that, like many writers about trans and gay rights, assumptions are made by the author about the reader, particularly that the reader is up-to-speed subjects like conversion therapy, de-transitioning, the meaning of terms like TERFs, and so on. For example, the Scottish government is attempting to overturn the UK government’s veto of a bill to make it easier to change legal gender (see Rosemary Brien’s article ‘Scotland, gender reform and law: difference and common ground’ here on Ekklesia). But unless one is intimately involved in Scottish parliament vs. Westminster politics, it’s difficult to disentangle the issue itself from the ongoing rivalry between the administrations. Nevertheless, what Chappell has to say, especially as she is a resident of Scotland, is well-informed and well worth reading.
Although I would have liked to see more, there is a little theology in the book (e.g. in section 2.14 Myth ten: ‘Transgender is unbiblical and sinful’), and Chappell is explicit about her commitment to the Christian faith. She points to the decidedly delightful parody website www.godhatesshrimp.com, and I also see that Chappell is due to speak at the Greenbelt festival this August – it will be interesting to see what she decides to include in her talk there. Perhaps she could unpack further the following:
The Bible goes on and on and on about the wickedness of accumulating money, and plenty of rich evangelicals are very smooth and slick about talking their way round that mountain of evidence that condemns their monstrous and idolatrous greed. At the same time, they want to condemn me for being a trans woman on the basis of, essentially, no biblical evidence whatsoever. It just doesn’t stack up.
This is an intensely personal book, where Chappell uses personal memoir, as well as poetry, and philosophical musings. Some sections read more like professional philosophical writing and are the hardest to grasp. There is also an open letter to J.K. Rowling – excellently written – as well as an interesting thought experiment. The latter is a sort of science-fiction account, similar to William Morris’s News From Nowhere, of what might happen if gender/sex were thought of differently in society.
This book should be read by those who oppose Chappell, especially evangelical Christians. They may gain a lot. She writes:
I’d love it if my words could reach out and touch someone who is as alienated from their own transgender nature as I used to be – and help them too to become, openly and manifestly, whoever it is they secretly dream of being.
For this to happen, there’d need to be someone reading this who is something like the fairly hard-line evangelical Christian that I used to be, or otherwise self stiflingly moralistic. Which might seem a little unlikely (though perhaps it is likelier than it seems; I am not the only lady ever to protest too much). But when I think what it took to get me from that position to where I am now (I’m none of those things now except Christian) my heart goes out to people who are like I used to be. To anyone who is as miserably repressed and self-hating as I once was, I want to say: another world is possible. You are allowed to be happy, and you are allowed to be who you really are. Seize the day and take hold of the freedom you were born for. You’re going to love it.
Chappell’s book is full of lovely little insights, often given as asides. For example, on the argument that trans has increased in society simply because there is more awareness of it:
When schools stopped trying to beat left-handedness out of pupils, there was a ‘sudden upsurge’ of people identifying as left-handed. Things settled down when the left handers reached their natural level, which is about 10 per cent. The same is very likely to be true with trans gender.
Another is this:
According to the online bigots, there is another double bind for trans people here: if they don’t go in for medical interventions then clearly ‘they don’t really mean it’, whereas if they go for medical interventions then they are ‘mutilating themselves’ and ‘putting themselves in the hands of Zionist big pharma’. It’s amazing what people can be got to say sometimes.
Throughout, she comes across as warm and forgiving of her adversaries, for example:
Not everyone I’d like to accept me, has accepted me. There are people close to me, people who should have known better, who have been far less accepting than I hoped for. In some cases their indifference or equivocality has turned into a shouting-in-my-face insistence, which they won’t abandon even when directly asked to, and which turns at times into something indistinguishable from full-on transphobia. This hurts. And it hurts too when people just drop me for being trans; no aggression, no insults, but a deathly silence of ghosting and erasure.
However, she goes on: But that isn’t how most people have responded; and it is important to focus on the good things, not the bad. Absolutely.
* Trans Figured: On Being a Transgender Person in a Cisgender World. By Sophie Grace Chappell. Published 12 April 2024; ISBN: 978-1-5095-6150-6; Hardback £25.00.
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© Bob Carling is a zoologist/pharmacologist with over 30 years’ experience in publishing. He is Ekklesia’s publishing consultant and helped establish the Ekklesia Publishing imprint in 2016, as well as the Siglum imprint. Bob handles production for our books as well as our web management. He has previously worked for Academic Press, Chapman & Hall and the Royal College of Physicians, among others. He is a musician and his website can be found here.