Mick Hartley

Ayaan Hirsi Ali draws some interesting parallels between Islam and gender ideology, with their shared view of women as a “cluster of sexualized stereotypes”. Islam, Autogynephilia, and Ideological Capture:

When a nation’s laws subsist on an ideology like Islam, it subjugates about half of its population. I have written for years about the ways in which Islam deprives women of autonomy, choice, and personhood – today I want to bring this into comparison with a new ideology which threatens to deprive half of the population of basic and crucial rights.

“Which societies view womanhood as a cluster of feminine stereotypes (an ultimately male-supremacist worldview)? A certain organized religion comes to mind.”

I wrote these words last week to hint towards the regressive implications of redefining “woman” to mean “cluster of sexualized stereotypes” unmoored from the unglamorous reality of embodiment. When men decide in adulthood that they want to be women, they don’t refer to womanhood itself, but to a hyper-feminine, hyper-sexual fantasy. Under this model, womanhood can be adopted and discarded by men as they wish: “Anything you can do, I can do better.” See this sign at a recent Trans Rights protest, whose message has become quite normal in the movement: “Admit it, you want a girlfriend with a cock.”  […]

It must be difficult to have a paraphilia consume one’s everyday thoughts. But the demand that we call people with these fetishes women in order to satisfy their sexual compulsions is an assault on the very nature of womanhood and a failure to help those individuals to accept reality: That they are men with fetishes. 

Perhaps the most crucial difference between homosexuality and transgender identification is that the former is not a self-given “identity” which others must affirm as real. The latter is just that: A denial that women are a sex class, not a feeling or a fantasy. Women do not have to identify as women – we don’t “opt in” to womanhood – we just are. Simply bending to the demands of AGPs (demands which will surely increase in extremity, as fetishes become more extreme when they are indulged) and their legions of activists is not an option. 

Before I conclude, I want to return to the way Islam has paradoxically captured the Left. Footage of high-up British Labour Party politician, Angela Rayner, shows her appealing for Muslim votes in a room devoid of women. Needless to say, Rayner identifies as a feminist but will never criticize the Islamic culture of female silence, absence, and subordination. Similarly, the uncomfortable truth is that gender ideology is naively driven by women in the West as well as the relatively small, but incredibly empowered, numbers of men with perverse incentives. Women who support gender ideology often haven’t experienced the violations which women in hospitals, salons, or sports face when men invade their space. Women, too, make up a vocal portion of the far left who lend their support to radical Islam as part of their anti-White activism. This can be explained by what I call “right side of historyism.” The obscurantism of gender ideology, which reshapes language away from clarity, dupes well-meaning liberals into defending old-fashioned misogyny. 

There's also a congruence between Islam (in Iran at least) and radical trans ideology, in their shared belief that homosexuals are really women born into the wrong body. In Iran, if they avoid the noose, transition via bodily mutilation is the only acceptable "cure" for gays. It's not quite that bad with gender cultists – yet – but it's the same old homophobia.