Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism

beyond the debilitating effects of gender dysphoria. Moreover, many post-operative trans people have found that the operation actually lessens their overall distress around binary gender identity. Amy explains: “‘Being female is an important part of my identity, but it’s not an all-consuming part any more. Until I transitioned and completed surgery, it was much more so. I woke up from surgery, and the burning dissonance, the feeling of everything being wrong, wasn’t there any more. These days, I realise that I don’t actually have that strong a sense of gender any more. Isn’t that strange, given all I went through to get here?”
     
    The radical gender fluidity within the trans movement is exactly what Bindel, when I spoke to her in the process of writing this book, emphasised above everything else: “Normality is horrific. Normality is what I, as a political activist, am trying to turn around. Gender bending, people living outside their prescribed gender roles, is fantastic – and I should know. I’ve never felt like a woman, or like a man for that matter – I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean. I live outside of my prescribed gender roles, I’m not skinny and presentable, I don’t wear makeup, I’m bolshie, I don’t behave like a ‘real woman’, and like anyone who lives outside their prescribed gender roles, I get stick for it.”
     
    What Bindel has failed to grasp is that trans people, far from “seeking to become stereotypical”, are often as eager to live outside their prescribed gender roles as she is, and just as frustrated by the conformity that a misogynist society demands from those who wish to ‘pass’. Marja Erwin told me that “gender identity and gender roles are not the same. I am trans, and I am not the hyperfeminine stereotype. I am a tweener dyke and more butch than femme. I know other trans womyn who are solidly butch, and others who are totally femme, and, of course, the equivalents among straight and bi womyn.”
     
    Much of the stereotyping imposed upon trans women is enforced by sexist medical establishments – a phenomenon which radical feminists and trans activists are unanimous in decrying. Bindel, like many trans feminists, objects to the fact that psychiatrists are “allowed to define the issue of gender deviance”, giving medical professionals social and ideological influence beyond their professional remit. Clinics in the UK require trans people to fulfil a rigid set of box-ticking gender-performance criteria before they will offer treatment and SRS demands this conformity with special rigour. To receive SRS, trans women patients will normally be expected to have ‘lived as a woman’ for two years or more -but individual psychiatrists and doctors will get to decide what ‘living as a woman’ entails. A UK psychiatrist is known to have refused treatment because a trans woman patient turned up to an appointment wearing trousers, whilst Kasper, a trans man who was treated in Norway, was pressured to stop dating men by surgery gatekeepers. “I had to answer a lot of invasive questions about my sexuality and my sex life, and one of the doctors I had to see lectured me about how transitioning physically might make me stop being attracted to boys,” he says.
     
    The demand that trans people conform to gender stereotypes in order to be considered ‘healthy’ or ‘a good treatment prospect’ is part of an experience that cis women also experience in their dealings with the psychiatric profession. It is standard practice for women in some inpatient treatment facilities to be pressured to wear makeup and dresses as a sign of ‘psychological improvement’.
     
Real female bodies?
    Feminists – even prominent ones with big platforms to shout from – do not get to be the gatekeepers of what is and is not female, what is and is not feminine, any more than patriarchal apologists do. Intrinsic to feminism is the notion that such gatekeeping is sexist, recalcitrant and damaging. If feminists like Greer, Bindel and Jan Raymond truly believe that having a vagina, breasts, curves, a uterus, being fertile or sporting several billion XX chromosomes is what makes a person a woman, it clearly sucks to be one of the significant proportion of women who have none of these things.
     
    There are women all over the world who lack breasts following mastectomy or a quirk of biology; women who are born without vaginas, or who are victims of female genital