Mick Hartley

Helen Joyce at The Critic on how gender theory is built on euphemisms:

[O]ne of the core tenets of critical theory is that it’s impossible to be truly liberated from what their high priest, Michel Foucault, dubbed “power-knowledge” — a kind of glorified status quo. All you can do is tinker. 

You can wear drag to subvert masculinity, call yourself “queer” to smash heteronormativity or identify as non-binary to “trouble” the categories of male and female. You can’t actually liberate women, only make the category of “women” meaningless by detaching it from any corporeal criteria.

If queer theorists were correct, women would never have won the right to vote, to own property or to study and work on the same terms as men within the rigged “power-knowledge” system known as patriarchy. But there is one group whose failings are nicely explained by queer theory — queer theorists themselves. They avert their critical gaze from culture-war topics because they don’t want to bite the research councils that feed them.

It is difficult to get a professor of gender studies to understand the importance of a clear definition of “woman” to women’s legal rights when her grant to study pregnant men depends on her not understanding it.

This self-interested quietism is why the gender theorists are so attached to euphemism. Their linguistic landscape is blissfully free of confused teenage girls getting their breasts chopped off, and middle-aged men whose cross-dressing fetish has expanded into an all-consuming desire for castration. Instead they celebrate “top surgery” and “gender affirmation”. If you point out what these gruesome operations involve, you are called obscene.

That word is as loaded as “fringe” or “distraction”, but again the queer theorists play deaf and dumb. I think it’s the surgeries that are obscene, not the words. Gender clinicians are promising their patients impossibilities, and concealing that fact with language that cries out for a critical analysis.

That they get away with it reveals where the power really lies — and it’s not with the unenlightened masses being forced to pretend that a castrated man has somehow become a woman, or indeed with the man whose obsession has led to his mutilation at the clinicians’ hands.