Mick Hartley

I posted on the first part of Allan Stratton three-part series on gender supremacy last month, and wondered in passing if this phenomenon was the first or at least most notable case of the absurdities of post-modernism  – in this case "Queer Theory" – escaping from the confines of the academy and infecting everyday life.

Anyway, now here's part two – Rescuing the Radicalized Discourse on Sex and Gender:

According to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, a priest’s blessing transforms the material substance of communion wafers and wine into the actual body and blood of Christ, even as the wafers and wine retain their outward appearance. Gender supremacists have a comparable doctrine—let’s call it transgenderation—by which the faithful must believe, literally, that “transwomen are women.” (It also demands that transmen are men, though it’s interesting to observe that the male-identified half of the trans community isn’t nearly so strident in its insistence on transgenderation as the female component.) I am not speaking figuratively here: A leading trans scholar at Berkeley, Grace Lavery, has claimed that (in the words of the university’s own headline writers) “truly changing sex is possible.”

As someone who has lived the internal politics of the LGBT community for decades (being of the G persuasion), I’ve noted that many of the gender-supremacist movement’s most doctrinaire high priests are trans women who, notwithstanding their loud and proud self-identification, seem quite happy with their penises and chest hair. Their Internet acolytes typically consist of mostly straight, bi, or queer-identified young people who are eager to sign on to what seems like a progressive movement. The priests aren’t elected, nor do they seem to represent the bulk of transgender individuals (who generally have a more realistic understanding of how biology works). However, the priests have been able to maintain their influence, and protect themselves from criticism, through word games and the threat of quick-trigger transphobia accusations.

But you don’t have to understand Catholic doctrine to know how this game works. The Looking-Glass world of Lewis Carroll is good enough:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

Humpty Dumpty’s will to power is instructive here, because the public discussion about trans rights, in most cases, is no longer about being kind and respectful toward trans people—a principle that everyone of goodwill now generally agrees on. Rather, it’s a project aimed at manipulating language as a means toward mastery in areas of policymaking where the rights of transwomen (in particular) conflict with other rights, including those of women who seek to keep their intimate spaces free of male-bodied individuals; and parents who feel that their children are being pressured to use transition as a means to deal with unrelated traumas or psychological conditions. […]

This lurch into the Looking-Glass world is presented as the height of progressive enlightenment. But it’s the opposite: For over 60 years, I watched the LGBT and women’s movements separate the concepts of sex and gender, so that effeminate boys (“genderqueer” or “gender non-conforming,” in modern parlance) could grow up to be Quentin Crisp, and girls could be Fran Liebowitz, all without judgment and harassment. The more avant-garde approach, on the other hand, erases the real distinction between sex and gender by demanding that the former be subordinate to the latter. But of course, gays, lesbians, and bisexuals experience same-sex attraction on the basis of real biological sex, not the abstraction of gender.

That attraction is foundational to our lives and self-understanding. Yet it is systematically denied by gender supremacists, who are incapable of reconciling their claims about human identity except through the fiction that humans are sexually attracted based on the gender self-identification of potential partners. (To give up this claim would be to admit that a lesbian isn’t going to be attracted to a male body, no matter how many times she is assured that the body in question belongs to someone who identifies as a woman.) The LGB population, in other words, has effectively been gaslit to fit the ideological convenience of a subset of trans activists—a deeply homophobic project.

But the tide is turning, as more and more people – women especially – are fighting back.

When today’s gender priesthood refuses to engage even good-faith LGBT allies, they abdicate the moral high ground and lose all credibility. Unable to persuade, they resort to bullying. Such aggressive tactics have allowed them short-term success in academia, arts, government, and NGO circles, where employees and administrators fear the professional consequences that go with ideological heterodoxy. But this success has come at a price, as there is now a large and growing group of disaffected progressives, LGB and otherwise, who see militant trans activists not as allies, but as political liabilities who have hurt our cause—right down to the language we use to describe our very being.