Sex-role stereotyping and transgender's new friends

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.