Interview: Florence Ashley is “That Bitch”
Transgender activist Riki Wilchins interviews academic and legal scholar Florence Ashley.
by Riki Wilchins
Canadian academic and legal scholar Florence Ashley has become a rising star in trans studies, with their critiques on a variety of hot-button political issues—from medico-psychiatric gatekeeping and the ethics of withholding blockers to so-called “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” and the UK’s pseudoscientific Cass Report—being widely cited in media and academic circles. Assigned Media recently interviewed them via Zoom.
AssignedMedia: You’ve written that your pronouns are “they, them, and ‘that bitch.’” Have you always felt like “that bitch” inside, ever since you were little?
Florence Ashley: Well, I was a bitch. Then I became “that bitch.” It was an evolution. You know: boys grow into women, girls grow into men, and little bitches grow into “that bitch.”
AssignedMedia: In 2019, bioethicist Maura Priest published a groundbreaking paper which noted that in addition to recognizing a right to protection from parental physical harms, courts are expanding that to protection from non-physical psychological harms. She argued that this could include the harm adolescents suffer from parental denial of blockers or hormones. You published a pivotal paper supporting her argument that kids have a legal right to their bodies and genders.
Florence Ashley: We don’t see minors as having the cognitive and emotional capacity to consent as adults, normalizing this very paternalistic approach that imposes upon youth rather than supporting them. So we're denying the capacity kids do have and imposing our own decisions on them. But we also need to help parents support and accept trans kids, who are constantly making and remaking these choices every day. So while it would be great for kids to have a legal right to hormones or blockers, if it meant their getting kicked out of their home, it’s still a negative outcome. So we need this dual track: recognizing the autonomy of youth, while ensuring parental support.
AssignedMedia: Kids are considered unreliable narrators of their own genders—unless they're cisgender, of course, in which case we should believe them 100%! The challenge is that while courts have extended rights to teens absent parental consent with abortion, STDs, and birth control, these are one-off and/or private actions. But transition is neither: it is continuous and public. It’s unclear how courts would adjudicate the nearly endless parent-child conflict: the right of a trans daughter to buy girl clothes if her parents will only pay for boy clothes, or a trans son to join the Boy Scouts if his parents will only enroll him in Girl Scouts.
Florence Ashley: The problem is, we don't want a high level of government and court surveillance, where the only recourse is putting a trans kid into the child welfare system, which in most situations means calling in Child Protective Services.
AssignedMedia: Because you see gender is an exploration, a constant remaking of decisions, you’ve written that we must shift our current transition-averse ethic where kids must ensure they are trans to an ethic of embracing transition AS the exploration.
Florence Ashley: If somebody is uncertain, we tell them, “We can't let you transition until you're sure.” But pre-transition certainty is not any measure of the degree of satisfaction that their transition will bring. You can make strong guesses as to what you’ll like in the future, but you can’t know you’re actually right until you get there. You’re just making a prediction. So this idea that you need to be certain of your gender before you transition imposes a requirement for a certainty that doesn’t exist. It makes more sense allowing people to explore the very things they are trying to figure out.
AssignedMedia: We treat transition as a necessary evil to be avoided if possible. And you're saying: no, it can be a positive thing we should stop trying to protect kids from. This leads me to your paper on the ineffectiveness of medical gatekeeping, where it is pointed out that there are four main tools; formal DSM-V diagnosis, detailed gender histories, standardized questionnaires, and tracking regret rates. But ALL depend on data on self-report. Looking at hundreds of studies, you showed that all this gatekeeping performs no better than Informed Consent.
Florence Ashley: The gatekeeping can actually be worse, because it pushes kids into a very defensive position. Imagine a 12-year-old who has been on a waitlist for years and finally on the cusp of getting hormone blockers confronted with a white-coated clinician who decides whether or not they get care. Is this kid going to explore all their doubts or voice all their questions? Gatekeeping disincentivizes the very honestly we need and is counterproductive to the thing it purports to do: improve outcomes. The best model is Informed Consent where kids are supported without their access to care being threatened.
AssignedMedia: You’ve called for puberty blockers as the default for teens who may be trans. You argue that the way one biologically transitions physically right now in puberty strongly favors cisgender embodiment by raising the psychological and medical costs of transition. But “puberty blockers structurally place transgender and cisgender hormonal futures in approximate symmetry.”
Florence Ashley: Some people mistook that as saying we should automatically put ALL youth on blockers. I just think blockers should be available to all youth, because that allows them to explore. Despite our claim that puberty blockers are for giving teens time for questioning, we are really only prescribing them for kids that are pretty damn sure that they're trans. They might not be 100% sure what flavor, but they have to be pretty certain that they're trans. How great would it be if they were just questioning but still had the option to pause puberty with blockers?
AssignedMedia: I'm drawn to your idea of using “gender modality” instead of “gender identity.” As if “gender identity” is a single, fixed frame in the longer ongoing movie that is “gender modality.”
Florence Ashley: “Gender modality” was a response to a dual problem I encountered in law, where the defining term for trans is “gender identity.” So discrimination against trans people is discrimination based on gender identity. The implication is that these terms have nothing to do with cisgender people who get the word “sex.” While gender identity plays a role when somebody is fired for being a trans woman, they weren’t fired because they were a woman: they were fired for being trans. “Gender identity” is inaccurate. because she probably has the same gender identity as other women.
Also, there have been so many debates about the relationship between non-binary and trans, and between being trans and cis. But what about between Two-Spirit and trans, or hijra and trans? We don’t have an umbrella term under which we can discuss all these cultural identities. That’s one of the powerful things about “gender modality:” it doesn’t tell us what to think about or resolve those questions; it holds a space for the nuances and complexity.
AssignedMedia: As you know, while the broad thrust of the field agrees and is moving toward this idea of trans and of gender as this mobile, fluid exploration, this goes directly against the weight and history of nondiscrimination law, which privilege fixed and immutable characteristics and which trans lawyers are arguing in courts and state legislatures right now. It’s an impossible bind.
Florence Ashley: First, I don't think being mobile or fluid is at odds with it being essential and fixed. Whether something is fuzzy or fluid is a different question from whether you can change it or not. Gender identity can be fluid and evolving and fuzzy without being changeable. Second, we have a clear example of something that's quite changeable but is still at the heart of anti-discrimination law: religious belief. Religious discrimination is prohibited by law, and religious belief is considered immutable for the purposes of anti-discrimination law, although it is something that you can change.
AssignedMedia: I think that may be a bit apples and oranges. The legal protection afforded religious belief is more because of our valorization of religious belief as something that must remain free from outside compulsion. I don’t think that’s the same as non-discrimination law based on physical characteristics like age, race, or sex. But even granting your argument, I would find that it very difficult to make before a skeptical judge or legislature, because we associate fixedness with the absence of change, so it’s hard to think of fluidity as a stable characteristic.
Florence Ashley: It is true that like right now we can't really imagine ourselves going to court with these arguments. But I think that has less to do with the fact that they are inherently implausible, and more with the fact that we've had the fight for decades based on immutability.
AssignedMedia: You’ve just come out with a new book on trans sexuality: Gender/Fucking—The Pleasures and Politics of Living in a Gendered Body. How was it writing such an intimate book and how has it been received?
Florence Ashley: It was really therapeutic to write, and the reception has been fantastic. One thing that's been interesting has been the tension between wanting to put my voice out there, and then realizing that—especially for many cis readers—it’s being read as a transition memoir. Nothing against transition memoirs, but that misses the point. Gender/Fucking is an exploration of disruptive messiness of transition and the much broader topic the human messiness of sex and how we can learn from arousal. It’s an invitation to engage in questioning our lives. And when it’s read that way, I feel like I’m naked on a nudist beach. But when it’s read as a transition memoir, I feel like I’m naked in front of a gallery voyeuristically examining my body.
AssignedMedia: It's a very brave book. Thank you for joining us today.
Riki Wilchins is the author of 13 books on trans and gender theory and politics. Her latest is BAD INK: How the NYTimes SOLD OUT Transgender Teens.