Mick Hartley

Allan Stratton at Quillette, in the first of a three-part series on The ‘Gender Supremacist’ Threat to the Progressive Alliance:

There have always been conflicts within the LGBT+ community. But the recent capture of Western political and cultural institutions by a faction of radicalized transgender activists presents a more existential type of crisis. The backlash against this clique’s overreach, which we are already beginning to observe, won’t be felt merely by the LGBT+ movement in whose name these activists present their demands, but by progressive causes more generally. Gender supremacists (as I call them) seek to entirely replace sex with gender as a legal category, an unpopular project that is squandering decades of hard-won LGBT+ social capital; contradicts the arguments that led to our most important policy victories; alienates our allies (especially in the women’s movement); and redefines gays and lesbians in a way that effectively erases us out of existence.

To be clear: Trans people should have the same rights as everyone else to live openly, freely, and safely. Gender identity and expression deserve legal protection under human-rights and anti-hate-crime laws. I am not arguing that the LGBT+ community’s component groups and their progressive allies should stop co-operating in the fight for human rights. But that mission is compromised when our organizations and communications channels are used to bully and misrepresent anyone who refuses to go along with the most extreme formulations of Queer Theory. For those of us who have been with the LGBT+ movement for the long haul, this hijacking of our cause doesn’t just represent a strategic miscue, but also an act of betrayal.

Perhaps the most surreal and unpopular claim offered by gender supremacists is the idea that sexual attraction isn’t triggered by physical bodies. Instead, the theory goes, we’re attracted by someone else’s internally felt understanding of gender. Similarly, terms such as “man” and “woman,” as commonly understood throughout history all over the world, are being redefined by Western academic theorists to refer to gender presentation, rather than biological categories. To pretend that sex isn’t a defining category when it comes to identity and sexual attraction is to gaslight human experience. Further, it serves to marginalize the vast majority of LGBT+ community members, and makes a mockery of the rationale behind the Gay Liberation movement itself. The “progressive” agenda of gender supremacists is, in its effects, just as homophobic as the reactionary right-wing discourse we thought we’d left behind.

We used to snigger at the absurdities of post-modernism, and all the obscure sub-divisions that proliferated from the teachings of (mostly) French post-war philosophers that came to be known as Theory, and successfully came to dominate, in particular, English departments in American universities. Remember the Sokal hoax, where the full glorious fatuity of it all was made clear for everyone to see and laugh at? Or the bad writing contest, where the wilfully obscure pretensions of writers like Judith Butler were exposed? I wonder if this is the first real case of the effects of this nonsense – in this case Queer Theory and its ramifications – finally escaping the confines of the academy and making itself felt in the real world?

Well, we're not laughing now.