The London Review of Books normally only features in this blog when I am reporting on the VIDA count — it has a lamentable record. However, that doesn’t mean that they don’t publish women at all. The forthcoming issue will contain an article by a woman, and it is about trans people. What’s more, you can read it online here.

Jacqueline Rose’s essay is very long, and somewhat rambling. It is broadly supportive, and contains a lot of interesting stuff. I certainly learned a few things from it. I don’t expect many of you will have the stamina to read it, but I know some of you have. As with any long piece, it goes off the rails a little in places, and I wanted to note those here.

First up, I don’t think it was “sentimental” of the writers of The Danish Girl to change Lili Elbe’s story so that she died from the results of her gender surgery, rather than from a later attempt to give her a womb. I submit that it was a deliberate lie to make it seem like gender surgery is much more dangerous than it actually is, and to give the impression that being a trans woman is a crime publishable by death.

Second, it is not generally true that hijra, “renounce sexual desire by undergoing sacrificial emasculation”. Some may do. India is a huge country, and hijra are found in other parts of south Asia as well, so I’m actually not comfortable with any blanket statements. However, I do know that some hijra have partners (whom they presumably have sex with), that some do sex work (which they may or may not enjoy), and some are involved in ritual sex work as part of their religious function.

Thirdly, when Rose pisses all over the Trans Day of Remembrance, she is clearly unaware of the work done by Transgender Europe’s Murder Monitoring Project which most definitely does keep information about the victims aside from their names.

My main concern about the article, however, is that it is a think piece, and as such it spends a lot of time trying to understand and explain trans people. When someone from outside of the trans community tries to do this, it often results in pontification about what trans people are “really”, and in pitting parts of the trans community against each other to try to find who is doing trans honestly and authentically, and who is a liar and a fake. This never works, because trans people are not all the same.

If you think about a gender spectrum, for example, someone who has a very strong identification with one gender, which just happens not to be the one assigned to them at birth, is a very different person from someone who is genderfluid, or agnostic about gender. It makes no sense to say that one of them must be “doing trans wrong”. Look, some men like to spend their weekends running around mountains, or white-water kayaking, while others prefer to spend it sat on a couch drinking beer and watching football. Is one of those groups somehow doing masculinity “wrong”? Or are they just different?

(I’d make the same argument about female gender stereotypes, but pretty much whatever women do you can find a ton of articles in women’s magazines pearl-clutching about how this is inappropriate female behavior and everyone should stop doing it or GUILT!!!)

So it doesn’t matter if Kate Bornstein and Jenny Boylan have different views as to what it means to be trans. That’s natural and healthy, not a sign that one is honest and the other lying to herself and others. If the trans thing has a value to feminism and gender studies, it is because we explode boxes in all sorts of interesting ways. Please don’t try to find new boxes to put us in.