Yet more matters ideological

Still on the identity politics theme, which is getting increasingly hard to avoid on both social and mainstream media, and breaking news for those who claim there’s no such thing as a transgenderist ideology, there is in fact a set of beliefs about the state of being transgender, which are characteristic of a group – ergo an ideology. 

These beliefs are usually presented on social media in the form of memes and mantras, and in mainstream media, in opinion pieces and articles that are often poorly-researched and one-sided.

These beliefs include: 

• Biological sex is not binary, it is on a spectrum, and the existence of the range of disorders or differences of sex differentiation is appropriated to support that claim.
• Gender identity is innate, or develops so early in development, it might as well be.
• Gender identity can also be fluid.
• People who are born male, even those who make no medical or appearance changes are, if they so declare, to be regarded as adult human females, legally and socially, and vice versa. 
• Any negative impact on current sex-based rights which exist to protect women and girls, or to counter-balance historical or current sex-based disadvantages, is deemed to be either non-existent or insignificant in comparison to the advantages accruing to transwomen of being fully included in the category of women or adult human female.
• To be inclusive of the tiny minority of transmen who still menstruate, or who want and are able to conceive and go through pregnancy, and so as to not emphasise the inability of transwomen to menstruate or to gestate new life, the terms associated with all aspects of being reproductively female, must be made gender-neutral. Hence terms like pregnant people, menstruators, people with a cervix, gestational or non-gestational parent, human milk, chest feeding, etc should be used. 
• Terms like biologically or genetically female or male must not be used.
• It is literally possible to be born in the wrong body, ie there is such a thing as a female brain in an otherwise male body, or vv.  
• At a more metaphysical level, there can be a female or male essence/ soul / spirit  inhabiting a male or a female body.
• Misgendering (ie use of incorrect third person pronouns) or dead naming (using a former name) should be designated as hate crimes. 
• It is possible for a three-year-old to know they are transgender, and appropriate for such a chid to be socially transitioned.
• If trans kids are not allowed to delay puberty chemically, they will kill themselves in alarming numbers. (1)
• Puberty blockers are harmless, or any harm they do is analogous to chemotherapy for childhood cancers.

And so on – a number of beliefs that constitute an ideology in the current sense of the word, and many of which are also ideological in the archaic sense of the word – ie visionary speculation of an unrealistic or idealistic nature.

In the 1980s – as neo-liberalism was poised to send the social and natural worlds into a tail spin from which both may never recover – a social contagion swept the anglophone world. 

Large numbers of people – many in  positions of authority – believed absolutely in the existence of a giant, global conspiracy of satanic child abusers. This drew together some very unlikely bedfellows such as the police, religious fundamentalists, and some radical feminists – and spread its tentacles into the corridors of governance. 

The evil-doers who were the focus of that moral panic were both male and female, and deemed to be literal immolators of children. Most of the victims of the moral panic were ordinary people, many of them parents, caught up in the hysteria. 

Most of the witch hunters and the vigilante mobs unleashed by them were not remotely interested in changing society foundationally in order that all children might be protected from all forms of abuse. They were in the grip of a weird form of bloodlust that demanded – and got – sacrifice. There are some who are still in its grip.

In this current era – which is a tipping point for neo-liberal capitalism and may well herald a rapid descent into some form of overt authoritarianism – there is a current social contagion, a wave of a fervent, almost blind-to-reason belief in the immutability of gender identity. It is ostensibly in defence of transgender people, and widely seen as progressive, ergo a phenomenon of the left. 

The witch hunters of this movement are both male and female, but it's the former who tend to be the most aggressive and domineering in pretty much all facets – who’d have guessed?

The designated evil-doers are TERFS (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) who are deemed to be the worst enemies (the hyperbole even extends into them being literal killers) of trans people, by being the primary instigators and transmitters of transphobia.

Trans people are depicted as uniformly weak and vulnerable and in need of protection – even those who gained (and retain) all the physical, social, and economic benefits of being born male, middle or upper class, and white.

Although there are men involved, in the mind's eye of the social media mobs, TERFs are female – and not just female – white, middle-class, feminist females. (2)

If these mobs, and the mass of institutional fellow travellers, were all in pursuit of a permanent change in the social and economic base of the world that was aimed at benefitting all people, if they were removing and disposing of the behavioural straitjacket of sex-role stereotypes – their fervour could be applauded – but mostly, they’re not. 

Mostly they're in the grip of a social contagion, or they are displacing their own disquiet, transferring their intense emotions from one sticking point to another. Or they are – not to put too fine a point on it – moral and political cowards. 

The TERF has become gender identity obsessed progressives’ social media scapegoat – rid the world of the TERF, and all will be well. 

Of course, most of them know that it won't. They know there'll still be racism, poverty, war, femicide, rape, economic and sexual exploitation, the annual holocaust of needless deaths of small black and brown persons, and all against the backcloth of a looming, multi-faceted global ecological disaster, but they can shelve all that while they're doing the work of the virtuous in silencing the Terrible TERFs.

It would be funny if it were not so destructive and divisive.

Notes:

(1)  An almost inevitable consequence of delayed puberty is multiple, major surgeries to change the body, and a life time of cross-sex HRT with attendant medical surveillance and testing regimes because of increased risk of cancer and of metabolic organ damage. There is also the hugely vexed question of whether, without such medical intervention,  some – possibly most – of these kids would become lesbian or gay. 

(2) This should also be considered in relation to another rising phenomenon - blaming white, middle class women for - well,  just about everything.