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Britain’s Appalling Transgender ‘Debate’

Contributing Opinion Writer

Caitlyn Jenner.Credit...Jerod Harris/Getty Images for PTTOW

Hold on to your crown jewels, members of Parliament: Caitlyn Jenner will address the House of Commons on Wednesday.

The talk is part of a series of lectures on the importance of diversity; other speeches have come from the British actors Riz Ahmed and Idris Elba. Ms. Jenner, the former Olympic athlete and reality show star, will be speaking in Westminster about the issue of gender identity and the heavy burdens carried by trans people worldwide.

You could reasonably ask whether Caitlyn Jenner is the right person to address Parliament on this issue, and many advocates are doing just that; she was, after all, an early enthusiast of Donald Trump, the biggest disaster for trans people in decades. But that’s not what unsettled me when I first learned of her speech.

What gave me the willies was the news that she’d also be participating in Tuesday night’s “Genderquake: The Debate,” which ran on Britain’s Channel 4, the sponsor of the diversity lecture at Westminster. On that show, she debated the legitimacy of transgender experience with, among others, the feminist icon Germaine Greer — a woman who over the years has said no small number of heartless things about trans people, including, “I’ve asked my doctor to give me long ears and liver spots and I’m going to wear a brown coat, but that won’t turn me into a cocker spaniel.”

I deeply resent the idea that my identity gets to be “debated” in the first place. I’m not alone in this; a number of activists in Britain protested the show for this very reason. (Others boycotted it because of Ms. Jenner herself.) As Dr. Adrian Harrop — a trans advocate who declined an invitation to be part of the show — told the website Pink News: “This debate is not about incorporating trans people into mainstream society and improving their lives and making sure they can access and engage with society on a meaningful level. This is a very basic debate around whether existing as a trans person is a valid, legitimate way to live one’s life.”

I understand that trans people participate in these public whippings in hopes of opening the hearts of strangers. But I’ve begun to wonder whether this work sometimes is self-defeating. As James Thurber once wrote, “You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.”

And bending over backward is how I would have described an attempt to open the hearts of adherents — like Ms. Greer — of the subset of feminism now populated by people that some trans activists call “terfs,” or trans-exclusionary radical feminists, who reject the idea that trans women know who they are. Journalists love to write clever think pieces about terfs and about the supposedly droll question, what makes a woman? (It is worth asking why the identities of trans men, whose numbers are by some counts considerably larger than that of trans women, are almost never interrogated in these pieces.)

Strangely, during Tuesday’s “debate,” Ms. Greer denied having ever said anything critical about transgender women, ever, and seemed to express a newfound respect for non-binary identities. It wasn’t clear, at least to me, whether she was gaslighting her audience or whether her views had genuinely evolved. One of the panelists noted, “She doesn’t know what she thinks,” and it was hard to disagree.

But anyone who thinks that Ms. Greer’s about-face created an atmosphere of conciliation and understanding should get used to disappointment. In the wake of her retreat, some audience members began to heckle and yell at the panel members, and the discussion turned into a melee of trans people trying to talk while other individuals (who presumably shared Ms. Greer’s earlier views) shouted schoolyard taunts at them like, as one panelist described it, “a bunch of 5-year-olds.”

I wasn’t surprised. This is what happens when we act as if the humanity of vulnerable, marginalized people is up for debate.

But transgender people don’t need any more think pieces about the legitimacy of our lives. What we need, and what we deserve, is justice, and compassion, and love. What we need is freedom from violence, and protection from homelessness, and the right not to lose our jobs, or our children, or our lives.

I don’t know whether I have ever spoken or written a word about my identity that has had half the effect of simply living my life publicly and without shame. At long last, I have landed on a new strategy for refuting the ideas of people who think I don’t exist.

I refute them by existing.

At the end of the “Genderquake” program, Ms. Jenner said, by way of conclusion: “We have to create a more loving society. We have to celebrate the differences in people. Show love toward one another.”

The audience booed.

And yet somehow, in the wake of that, Ms. Jenner and the other transgender people on the panel failed to disappear. Instead, they continued to exist — with dignity and courage and love.

Jennifer Finney Boylan (@JennyBoylan), a contributing opinion writer, is a professor of English at Barnard College of Columbia University and the author of the novel “Long Black Veil.”

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 27 of the New York edition with the headline: Britain’s Transgender ‘Debate’. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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