The policing of trans bodies should be a red flag for all of us

On the 22nd of April New Zealand First Leader Winston Peters proposed to replace legislation which allows people to self identify their own gender on identity documents with a new bill that would define in law a man as an ‘adult human biological male’ and a woman as a ‘biological human female’.

On the 10th of May trans, gender diverse and intersex people and allies will gather on Parliament lawn to protest Peters’ Bill with the slogan: We defy your definition. As my community organises I think about the natural allies that trans people have in disabled people. For a start many of us are both. The recent Counting Ourselves survey of trans and non-binary people in Aotearoa found that as many as 33% identified as disabled.

But more than that our oppressions are the same. The roots of transphobia and ableism are the same. Time and time again the law has failed to imagine disabled people’s right to majority experience. As disabled people we are painfully familiar with our bodies and ways of being over-scrutinised, over-medicalised, unimagined and excluded. We too defy definition.

Despite self-identification being first shepherded into Parliament by a member of his own party, Tracey Martin and the Bill passing by majority into law, Peters insists that this is a position his party has held for years. His proposed law change comes just after a ruling in the UK Supreme Court that has brought the definition of a woman as a ‘biological female’ into English law. Proponents of the law cite the motivation of protecting women and women’s spaces (read: cis women). Peters insists too that his proposed law would offer the supposed clarity on gender the “mass majority want”. Peters takes his supposed mandate from this undefined mass majority and a righteous global commitment to ending “woke nonsense.” 

I am a disabled non-binary person. As someone who has not medically transitioned, my disability - not my gender - marks me out as different for good and for bad.

More than once a trans, non-binary or intersex friend has apologised to me, confessing that they sometimes use (or want to use) accessible bathrooms. They know disabled people need them, it just makes using a public bathroom feel safer, you know. It feels more comfortable and their gender won’t be scrutinised there. I want them to know they don’t have to apologise to me or disabled people. Safety is an access requirement too. I have more to worry about than who else is using the bathroom or why don’t we all?

I think of my trans, non-binary and intersex friends trying to make fair use of what little accessible and safe space there is for us in the mass majority’s world. Our reasons are different, our needs the same: spaces we can use, places we can be ourselves, practically, accessibly and safely. 

I think about something else too. There was a time when I was not politically connected to trans and queer and intersex communities. There was a time when I was not politically connected to disabled communities.

There was a time when I too would have worried about who used which spaces. Parked in my wheelchair in front of what was often the only accessible bathroom in a given building I match the (note: genderless, sexless and sometimes even headless) figure in a wheelchair on the door and I would defend my use of my bathroom. I was battling everyday ableism without the words to name it. I wouldn’t have known to say this then but it felt powerless. I responded to feeling powerless, feeling righteous about the use of those few spaces that were obviously marked out for me - wheelchair parks and accessible bathrooms for example. I expected an explanation from others or felt gratified by a sheepish look when someone, apparently able-bodied, saw me waiting. 

I may have in fact been demanding explanations from people with invisible disabilities or chronic conditions, who, like trans and non-binary people, also find their rights to an accessible space scrutinised from all sides. Disabled friends with less visible disabilities than mine tell me they experience being called out. I may have been demanding explanations from gender diverse and trans people who felt safer in a genderless space or other reasons these spaces may have been useful. People with bodies, identities and histories not apparent to me without their active disclosure, which I may have felt entitled to but didn’t deserve. I don’t know. I had not imagined their stories because policing these spaces in my own small way felt like activism. I try to resist this now, although I still fall for that feeling sometimes. 

As people in power, I can imagine the motivations of Peters and Seymour to push an anti-trans position. It fits perfectly with a Trumpian politic that is systemically dismantling diversity and inclusion measures in the name of nationalism. Trans people are captured under the anti-diversity and inclusion reforms and so are disabled people. A US Government removing gender affirming care and recognition of trans people’s identities on passports is also proposing to access the medical records of autistic people in a bid for a “cure”.

The UK Prime Minister has also moderated his previously pro trans rights position seemingly for political capital and at the same time his Government has released a report on the cost of disability to the State. 

In Aotearoa, beyond the bathroom bill measures, our Sexuality Education guidelines are being reviewed and any curriculum that erases gender diversity has little hope of including other diversity like disabled people’s experiences. 

While these measures may not seem immediately related, they all make it harder for us to exist in full and uncategorisable public view. The roots of transphobia and ableism are the same in that they are underpinned by ideas about who unquestionably belongs and who does not. 

But what about this “mass majority” these politicians say they represent?

Photos have been released in the UK of people (presumably cis women) celebrating the ruling. The only way I can understand this jubilant scene is to think back to my own feelings of powerlessness. It is fighting for your own safety at the expense of others. I once mistook my assumptions (my lateral ableism) for activism and I can only think these women are mistaking patriarchy for protection. 

For minorities, our feelings of powerlessness arguably stem from having had to fight hard for what access and safety we have managed to create in spite of the world being designed with non-disabled cis people’s safety and access in mind. We have to resist the idea that sharing this space means losing it. Rights for trans people do not mean fewer for women, nor do they mean fewer for disabled people. 

When asked by RNZ to explain how his proposed law would work in practice - would people have to carry a gender passport? Peters suggested that he thought it would be reasonable to subject people suspected of using the ‘wrong’ bathroom, joining the ‘wrong’ sports team to biological testing. This seems on the one hand impractical to implement and on the other hand eerily eugenic. But ultimately it does not matter if these ideologies are implementable or not. The power of these proposals are in the social licence they give us to exclude and police each other and see each other not only as threats to safety as the trans exclusionary argument goes but threats to our own belonging.

The scarcity of spaces like accessible, genderless and safe spaces points to a need for more - more for all. If we are busy arguing amongst ourselves about whose safety or access is more important, we are looking away from those in power. As we fight over the small patch of inclusion in their world they take more of it for themselves. Collective action - however that looks - by trans and disabled people together is not only an act of solidarity but a bid for a different world. One where none of us can be easily categorised but where we can all defy definition and still have the grace to assume each other belongs and has the right to. 

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