“holy men eat the tails of beavers during fasting times – as being fish, since, as they say, they partake of the nature of fish both in taste and colour”
– The History and Topography of Ireland, by Gerald of Wales, C12th.
The churchman Gerald of Wales referenced the intriguing misclassification of beavers by the Catholic Church. Today we think of the differences between a beaver and a fish as fairly obvious, and do not mistake them for the same category of creature. Beavers have fur, fish have scales. Beavers can survive out of water, fish cannot.
So, why was the Catholic Church confused? Eating meat was forbidden on Fridays, Ash Wednesday and during Lent, although eating fish was permitted. Some people wanted to bend the rules and eat meat.
A 17th century Bishop of Quebec asked his superiors whether his congregation were allowed to eat beaver meat. They were. Dispensation was also given to eat barnacle geese. Perhaps we may grant the people of the time a little latitude as they had never seen the barnacle geese’s eggs. The explanation for their procreation was assumed to lie in barnacles. Mistaking geese for shellfish was a simple enough mistake…
The trapper (or rather, ‘fisherman’) would surely have known that the beaver and the barnacle goose were not fish. The theologian would have known it. The lucky people eating beaver and goose knew it. But it was so much more expedient, profitable and tasty to pretend that the watery habitats they shared in common meant these creatures were fish. It was a legal fiction.
Wishful thinking was to blame. The Catholic Church stipulated so many meat-free days. What were poe-faced clerics with clever minds and only a loose interest in material reality to do? Thus, wishful thinking found itself in the same category as wilful obfuscation.
In a recent interview in The Telegraph, Stella Creasy claimed:
“Of course biological sex is real – it’s just not the end of the conversation. I am somebody who would say that a trans woman is an adult human female. I would say that you and I were adult human females.”
She is not the first politician to play loose with sex categories and definitions. Sir Keir Starmer has refused to say whether a woman can have a penis. Labour MP Lisa Nandy once asserted that male rapists belonged in women’s prisons if they identified as women. Annaliese Dodds, the shadow women and equalities minister and Labour Party chairman, refused to define what a woman is on BBC Woman’s Hour.
Trans ideology has demanded for some time that “trans women are women” and “trans men are men”. If truth is territory, then ground was surrendered long ago. Gender critical feminists fight in the rearguard and ordinary people of common sense are this culture war’s surprised new foot soldiers. But Creasy’s language goes further than the common mantras.
Sex is defined in law by the Equality Act 2010. A woman is a female of any age, while a man is a male of any age. A female is ordinarily understood to be a female human in the biological sense. However, since the passing of the Gender Recognition Act 2004, men can apply for a gender recognition certificate, which entitles them to a birth certificate stating their sex as female.
In material reality, this does not mean a woman can have a penis. We all know that women don’t have penises. We all know that females are not males. I dare say Sir Keir Starmer knows it. I am sure that Stella Creasy knows it. Some trans people, activists and politicians may be guilty of wishful thinking, but it remains a legal fiction and wilful obfuscation.
Trans dogma is no less demanding than the Catholic Church’s erstwhile pronouncements on Fish Fridays, and few politicians want to disagree with a vociferous priestly class.
Yet words need to mean something. ‘Woman’ has been lost. If ‘female’ means male as well as female, what words are left to describe biological classifications? Must we refer to chromosomes and body parts?
Creasy’s language is Kafkaesque. The over-used descriptor is finally, completely apt. In Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa transforms into a gigantic insect. It is a terrible and nightmarish story. The language around trans ideology has become surreal, leaving women unable to define themselves, their needs and rights.
The inevitable consequences of extreme linguistic, legal and societal contortions now rack up. Transgender males have had sex with female inmates in prison. Transgender males have knocked women from sports podiums. Transgender males have paraded themselves in women’s refuges. It is time for heretics to speak up. The honest thing is to admit that sex is immutable, that sex categories are real and important, and reclaim the language necessary to describe them.
I first learnt about the mis-classification of beavers from the TV cookery series, ‘Two Fat Ladies’. The ladies chuckled as they explained the incongruities of a ‘compliant’ Tudor feast full of meat fish. Nowadays, dogma would demand the series be titled ‘Two Body Positive Cis Women’. But sex matters. And so does language.
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Author Laura Dodsworth
