Sex-role stereotyping and transgender's new friends

Girlhood should have room for dirty knees, awkward poses, yelling and wrestling – as well as thick waists and big noses. Just as boyhood should have room for dainty physiques, gentle collaborations, teary moments and reading with Mum. Sex role stereotyping closes down that space, from childhood into adult life. Individuality comes second; the foot must fit the shoe. Females take the brunt of stereotyping, but males also suffer.

Despite their cultural origins, stereotypical ideas often seem to come from the innermost psyche, as Cordelia Fine points out in her greatly acclaimed Delusions of Gender. So, while "millions of marketing dollars" are "spent promoting a pink, frilly world to girls", and this permeates girls' peer culture, it might still come as a shock to politically correct parents when their daughter demands pink frills; they begin to worry that their efforts to resist stereotypes in her upbringing were just holding back their daughter's true self (p 226).

While people usually come to accept stereotypes, they may still yearn at times for the privileges available on the other side of the sexual divide, and worry about meeting the expectations put on their own sex.

The transgender rights campaign presents a particular approach to this issue. Transgender people obviously challenge traditional ideas of what it means to be male or female – risking hostility, attack and even murder in doing so. The right to assert a transgender sexual identity has long been supported by the majority of lesbians and gay males, and on the Left. It has however brought transgender advocates into collision with some feminists, who point out that male-to-female transgender people lack not only female biology but the lifetime experience of being female, the memories of which shape current experiences of discrimination. These feminists also see the presence of male-to-female transgender people in women-only spaces as invasive, insulting, and sometimes dangerous. In Britain, transgender campaigners have at times prevented these feminists from speaking and organising, labelling them as "haters".

Bitter though that debate is, both sides contain many long term opponents of sex-role stereotyping.

Recently there has been a phenomenal expansion of support for transgender people. Most striking has been the endorsement of transgender rights by prominent politicians and by the conservative mass media, particularly evident around the transition of Bruce-to-Caitlyn Jenner, which was celebrated in Vanity Fair and admired by President Obama.

The Economist notes that this new support for transgender people has extended to sections of the US Republican Party. Presidential contender Rick Santorum, for example, "once compared same-sex marriage to the union of a man and a dog", but he supports Jenner. These Republicans are not being "bullied by cultural liberals", but rather have found room for transgender rights within conservative ideology. And while not all conservatives have kept pace with those like Santorum, "the outcome is not in doubt. The social forces that brought us to the Caitlyn Jenner moment are irreversibly ascendant".

This new conservative backing creates a sense of near-unanimity at the level of public commentary; support for transgender people now seems to cover all bases. Mainstream news reports regularly affirm transgender rights (see eg ABC News report 22.6.2015), and highlight services such as the Le Femme finishing school for aspirant ladies. Public challenge is rare. Actress Alice Eve wrote that Jenner was "playing at being a 'woman'", but quickly recanted after a social media backlash.

While welcome at one level, conservative endorsement for transgender rights has been combined with a zest for sex role stereotyping. As Elinor Burkett has written, Vanity Fair "offered us a glimpse into Caitlyn Jenner's idea of a woman: a cleavage-boosting corset, sultry poses, thick mascara and the prospect of regular 'girls' nights' of banter about hair and makeup". Burkett also notes Jenner's gender-essentialist idea of having a brain "much more female than it is male". Much of Burkett's concern lies in the use of transgender advocacy as a Trojan horse: when sex role stereotypes are advanced by proponents of transgender rights, they face little or no challenge, thus helping to "undermine almost a century of hard-fought arguments that the very definition of female is a social construct that has subordinated us. And they undercut our efforts to change the circumstances we grew up with."

Another disturbing trend is the presentation of transgender as the definitive or only frame for discussing discontent with male or female identity. This appears, for example, in a range of recent news articles about transgender clinics in Australian hospitals. The articles describe a growing interest in these services, while also implying that bodily change and acquiescence to conventional sex roles are the only options available.

A recent article on News.com.au has suggestedthat more than one per cent of Australian school children are likely to have gender dysphoria. In Victoria, the head of Royal Children's Hospital Gender Dysphoria Service has urged earlier access to cross-hormone treatment. In Western Australia, an average of one child a fortnight is being referred to the state's clinic for transgender young people; irreversible hormone replacement therapy is available from age 16. "About one in five children continue to identify as transgender into adolescence, with the rest 'coming to terms with their gender'".

Brisbane's Royal Children's Hospital "has seen more than 20 children with GID [gender identity disorder] in the last four years, including some as young as four," according to an article in the Courier Mail. The hospital's Director of Child and Youth Mental Health Services research says "research shows that about 50 per cent of children with significant transgender behaviour will desist, or grow out of it, by the time they reach puberty". Transgender behaviour continues, or they "grow out of it" – seemingly these are the only ways to think about the acceptance or rejection of gender identity.

Similarly, in "The transgender conversation we had to have" (Blanche Clark, Herald-Sun 29 May 2015), a coordinator of the Safe Schools Coalition Victoria says transgender adults recall childhood experiences of being forced to wear a dress or of having all their sister's dolls removed from the house to stop them playing with them.

"Now if you ask any specialist in the transgender field they would say that is really damaging to a child's health and wellbeing," she says.

Specialists in the transgender field, then, are positioned as the definitive or only people with something to say on the topic.

Several points emerge. Firstly, the issue of support for transgender rights needs to be disentangled from support for sex role stereotyping. The current rise in media and systemic support for transgender people will not eliminate threats to them from social backwaters. But accepting transgender people's rights, and defending them from attack, is very different from accepting the use of transgender to support typecasted gender roles. Making this distinction is particularly important when powerful sections of the Right are abandoning traditionalist views of men and women, and regrouping around a looser formulation that accommodates transgender while also buttressing sexual stereotypes.

Secondly, there should be political space to make this distinction without being misunderstood, or misrepresented, as a "hater".

Thirdly, it is noteworthy that some corporate interests stand to benefit from conservatively-framed support for transgender rights. Any weakening of opposition to stereotyping reduces PR pressure on companies that profit from the pinkification of girlhood and womanhood. And for Big Pharma, a bonanza beckons: irreversible hormone replacement therapy means a lifetime on costly drugs. The major pharmaceutical companies have already been linked to attempts to routinise drug treatment for bereavement and toddler tantrums (and the American Psychiatric Association has considered pathologising introversion). These are just elements of a complex picture, which includes the trend toward broader social acceptance of body modification, and a general tendency toward more relaxed cultural mores. But corporate interests do deserve scrutiny.

Fourthly, the framing of discontent with gender identity entirely via the binary of transgender and conventional sex roles obscures the need to remove the societal problem of sex role typecasting. The social problem is not just intolerance of transgender people, but also the fact that society imposes sex role stereotypes in countless subtle ways throughout our lives, which we then internalise to the point that these attitudes and behaviours appear innate.

Finally, people discontented with their gender identity, particularly young people, deserve access to a range of options and viewpoints on the issue. In particular, if young people come to hospital seeking physical transitions, it is worth carefully exploring – before they take the path toward life-changing surgery, irreversible hormone therapy, and adult infertility – whether the "female" or "male" status they desire is, fundamentally, a proxy for some of the traditional entitlements of the other sex, and a wish to escape from the pressures put on their own sex. Some of these concerns have already been raised by Libby Purves, a supporter of gay and transgender rights, who has expressed uneasiness that growing demands for physical transitioning is being fed, in part, by "old-fashioned stereotyping". This is not to imply that hospitals lack rigorous processes to review candidates for physical transitioning, or that they rush to judgement in these matters. It is to raise an issue that is political, but nevertheless intimately bound up with individuals' welfare and wellbeing.

Health and education websites and pamphlets that address discontent with gender identity should include a clear and substantial explanation of the nature and impact of sex role stereotyping, and the option of a freer lifestyle by defying stereotypic roles without changing one's body. This reduces the danger of later regret at irreversible physical change, and also the danger that people who want freer sexual roles, but who dread radical physical change, will fall back with relief into pink and blue typecasts.