Essence vs appearance

I'm getting hesitant about dipping my toes into the gender identity piranha pool but to me what matters about this ideology is its incredibly divisive and polarising nature – which is well demonstrated in this Facebook thread.

 Of particular note in the thread is the unedifying spectacle of biological determinists accusing the other side of being biological essentialists, and people roping in the complexities of differences of sex differentiation as proof of the assertion that gender (learned behaviour) is in fact innate whilst biological sex ­­– the foundation of species reproduction – is on a spectrum and mutable and can and should be changed as far as possible to align with a subjective, empirically unverifiable sense of an individual gendered self. 

 

Essence is in a battle to the death with appearance.

 

In my view, the current gender identity orthodoxy has been and still is accommodated by neo-liberalism and its compliant governments and NGOs precisely because it is idealist, individualistic, and divisive of the broad left. 

In truth, GI is a key player in NLism’s drive to break up all mass collectives which might threaten its economic dominance, and it has proved to be the perfect bandwagon for the west’s large numbers of useful idiots in search of a trendy cause. 

Gender identity ideology and its praxis breaks populations down to the level of a bespoke and subjective individual sense of gendered identity; reaggregation into small groups occurs and is tolerated and even promoted but only as long as those groupings pose no threat to the economic status quo. 

 

Anyone who refers to gender identity activists as being far left is ill-informed, or so far to the right they’ve either tipped over into a state of unreason or are at imminent risk of doing so.The primary source of support on the left for the ideology and its attendant praxis comes not from the old red left, but from the politically exsanguinated neo-liberal left which has given up on achieving foundational change and makes itself feel virtuous by filling in some of the superficial cracks in an inherently inequitable, grossly exploitative, and unstable system. 

 

Many on the neo-liberal left are in fact so comfy in the managerial / academic / technocratic roles they occupy, or anticipate occupying, they’re blind to how tactically dumb it is – in a world teetering on the edge of a perfect storm of natural and social disasters – to risk driving impoverished and anxious people into the waiting arms of the right. 

 

All those who are now crying about the alt-right leaping on the gender identity rights versus sex based rights issue need to ask whether, had trans activists not ridden rough-shod over sex-based rights, would there have been a backlash for the right to coat-tail and exploit?

 

Eg. why did TAs not lobby for additions to language to acknowledge and accommodate gender non-conforming people instead of a seemingly arrogant insistence on replacing language that was inevitably going to piss off large numbers of people, help further erode confidence in the left, and expose trans people to ridicule and aggression? 

 

And before anyone winds up the virtue sirens, replacing breast feeding with chest feeding, vagina with (the truly execrable) front hole, mother with birthing parent, menstruating women with bleeders etc is not the same as challenging sex and race stereotypes in language. 

 

Attacking arguably the most foundational of human beliefs about a material reality that cuts across sex, class, race, age, and in what is often a heedless and at times embarrassingly dumb fashion, was always going to result in a backlash. 

 

Like many of the older left wing feminists involved in all this, I was agitating for the destruction of the gender straitjacket decades before gender identity became the trendy issue du jour, and I’m frightened for all those who stand to be harmed when the political pendulum swings back and acts like a scythe. Gender critical feminists who are on the right or those who are prepared to ally with the right on this one issue, who think that scythe will somehow miss the sex-based rights they're fighting to protect, need to think again.

The last iteration of divisive and diversionary politics on the left helped usher in NLism. Given what may follow corporate capitalism could well be barbarism, people need to stop arguing over how to treat a headache when the patient’s clearly at risk of dying of sepsis.