Queer Theory and Transactivism: Supporting the Erasure of Women

Applying the philosophy

Now that you know a bit about philosophy and what academics get up to in university settings, let’s carry on with how this impacts our everyday lives.

Queer theory: disrupting the norm

In my world of birth, breastfeeding and mothering, queer theory has had the most profound effect on both public health messaging and on groups and organisations that support these. This is a field of Applied Postmodernism that emerged in the early 1990s out of Gay and Lesbian Studies and Women’s Studies. The term has been broadly associated with the study of gender and sexual practices which challenge the notion that heterosexual desire is normal and our “cisheteronormative” society. Queer theory seeks to have  gender-identity  replace  sex, and it produces proclamations such as “not only women give birth.”

Queering is about unmaking any sense of the normal, in order to liberate people from the expectations that norms carry. This is a political position that can be applied to anything which:

- casts doubts on stability (gender is fluid)

- disrupts seemingly fixed categories (male and female are artificial)

-  problematises any binaries it comes across (sex is on a spectrum)

Queer theory has a moral imperative to reject, disrupt and subvert scientific claims and common sense about gender, sexuality and even sex. Queer theorists spend no time acknowledging that biological realities exist and almost all of their time rejecting them and asserting the social construction of those categories.

For those who do not agree with the premise of queer theory, this is where the problems start. Substituting gender-free terms for sexed terms when communicating about birth, breastfeeding and “parenting” (as if from a baby’s point of view parental roles are interchangeable) makes it difficult to be clear whom one is talking about. There are times when we want—or need—to be exclusive, especially in research and advocacy for the mother/baby dyad.

Queer theory and transactivism: a marriage made in Hell

The incredible success of trans activism has upended the discourse completely. Three questions illustrate the eroding of women’s rights in the face of trans lobbyists.

Are trans rights human rights? Everyone, including transgender people, have human rights as stated by the United Nations Declaration. Trans rights activists seek to claim extra rights that others don’t have, for example, to be able to keep secret a previous identity, or to be able to prescribe how language is used.

Trans rights reject the science of body and sex. They deny the material reality of biological sex and claim that what a person thinks and feels is of most importance and that those thoughts and feelings can literally transform a body into the opposite sex. Trans rights dictate that everyone adheres to the trans way of interpreting and describing gender and sex.

Are trans rights an extension of gay rights? Gay rights concern the right for consenting adults to have same-sex relationships and to have the same rights as heterosexual people. Trans rights, on the other hand, seek the extra right to self-identify into a protected group and be eligible for that group’s special discretion. Gay rights do not involve medical or surgical treatment. Trans rights demand both these as a right and put transgender people, often young people influenced by social media, onto a conveyor belt of lifelong medicalisation.

Gay rights do not require others to forfeit anything. Trans rights insist on the forfeiture of single sex spaces, sports, scholarships, representation and even language. Gay rights accept and celebrate the body and sex. They do not deny biological science and recognise there are two sexes and the distinct reproductive capacity of each.

Aren’t trans rights just another civil rights battle? Previous civil rights battles included women’s franchise, the end of segregation and same-sex marriage. Real civil rights battles are societal gains. Trans rights demand that others give up what they have to others and become privileged over “cis” people. “Cis” is a term that defines a category of women. I find this a personally offensive term because there are no categories of women. “Trans” and “cis” are not useful labels because you can’t change your sex to become a woman if you were born biologically male.

Trans rights push to censor the words used to describe women and women’s bodies – foundational words like ‘mother’ or ‘woman’ – and replace them with dehumanising terms like ‘birthing parent’ ‘uterus bearers’ and ‘people who menstruate’.

“And in its requirement that everyone else accept trans people’s subjective beliefs as objective reality, it is akin to a new state religion, complete with blasphemy laws.”  Helen Joyce

Follow the money

Why has trans activism been so successful? The reason transgender ideology has accomplished in five years what it took gay rights 50 years to achieve is because it is the first minority group that has been monetised. Vast amounts of money have been donated by billionaires allowing a large number of full time paid activists to lobby governments, produce propaganda and influence media as well as a broad range of organisations.

One example of the influence money buys is the Yogyakarta Principles (YP), which were agreed upon at a fully paid conference held in Indonesia in 2006. The principles were drafted and signed by invited lawyers and human rights experts with no consideration at all of their potential effect on women’s rights. The YP project is largely coordinated by Allied Rainbow Communities, or ARC International (ARC), an NGO based in Canada. In her video analysis of the YP, feminist Anna Zobnina notes that ARC is basically a lobby group, not an internationally representative organisation. ARC International: Canada’s Dark Rainbow (womensspaceireland.ie)

The YP attempt “to make sex a defunct legal category … (as) we are moving towards a society where sex does not exist”, especially for women and girls, and to destroy the gains made in past decades by the feminist movement. They  are designed to replace sex, which is a scientific, biological fact, with “gender identity”, which is a feeling.

The Principles have never been accepted by the United Nations and attempts to make gender identity and sexual orientation new categories of non-discrimination have been repeatedly rejected by the General Assembly, the UN Human Rights Council and other UN bodies. In fact, the majority of members of the United Nations General Assembly opposed any reference to the YP as they are seen as being contradictory to the position of the UN Human Rights Council.

Despite this, they have been extremely influential internationally and are credited with gender self-identification law changes in Argentina, Canada, Ireland, Denmark and Malta, Scotland and New Zealand.

Another example of money talking in the UK is Stonewall. Formed in 1989 by a group opposed to a proposed piece of anti-same sex attracted legislation, this lobby group was successful in its aims. So successful in fact that by 2015, there was really nothing left for it to accomplish on the homophobia front so it looked for a new purpose and found one in the trans agenda.

Today’s Stonewall has wound itself, much like a parasitic amoeba, into every important institution, governmental agency, media company, employer and countless schools and every other place that human beings act together. Insisting on so called “equality, diversity and inclusion” they are bent on pushing the trans agenda to the detriment of everyone. This is partially evidenced in their statements around lesbians, because in their world, transwomen are women so some lesbians have a penis and if you are a lesbian who doesn’t want to have sex with a penis you are transphobic and bigoted. Stonewall has sold out lesbians and it's time they be held to account (feministcurrent.com)

What is the result of buying the trans snake oil?

Homophobia. “Transing the gay away” is now de rigueur in many situations. Reading accounts of so-called “transkids” it is obvious that many parents would rather have a trans child than a gay child. ‘She never liked to wear a dress/the colour pink’ are now given as reasons to mutilate her body, make her infertile and incapable of orgasm or an adult sex life and put her into menopause at 15 in a vain attempt to turn her into a boy. And preferring glittery sparkles to playing with toy cars is reason enough to make him infertile and stunt his brain development while attempting the impossible goal of creating a woman out of a boy.

“Substantial evidence from peer-reviewed scientific studies, case studies, and clinical trials suggests that puberty-blocking drugs can negatively affect the skeleton, cardiovascular system, thyroid, brain, genitals, reproductive system, digestive system, urinary tract, muscles, eyes, and immune system. Particularly urgent concerns for adolescents treated with puberty-blocking drugs are loss of bone mineral density and increased risk of osteoporosis; potential for decreased IQ and other cognitive deficits; increased risk of depression and suicidal thoughts; and stunted sexual and reproductive development.” Puberty Suppression Medicine or Malpractice.pdf (lesbians-united.org)

Misogyny. When everyone is a ‘gender identity’, rather than a sex, women are erased. By masking the sex you are, sex itself is masked. If sex is unimportant, as compared with gender, then women are unimportant because anyone can be one. Unfortunately, facts (those pesky things that don’t exist in applied postmodernism groupthink) tell a different story. Around the world, between 98 and 99% of all sex crimes are perpetrated by biological men. This figure does not change by including trans “women”.

It is not men who are being turned into ‘ejaculators’ and ‘prostate havers’; it is women who are referred to as ‘bleeders’ and ‘pregnant people’, which dehumanises us and reduces us to a series of body parts, rather than whole human beings. Women’s private spaces (toilets, changing rooms, etc.) were originally created to safeguard women in the knowledge that men are stronger and more likely to commit crimes against women. This allows us to use public spaces as freely as men do. But when anyone can “be” a woman this disappears. Nearly 90% of trans “women” never have any “bottom surgery” so retain the same penis they used as men. Even if they don’t use it inappropriately, for women who have any trauma around this just seeing naked male genitalia in a previously women only space can retraumatise them and mean they lose access to that space.

Putting men’s feelings first over the lived experience of  women erases and endangers us.

So what can you do?

Oppose the institutionalisation of this belief system: refuse to buy into the Pronoun Police. If your workplace/voluntary organisation/hobby group tries to enter this trap, ask questions about why this is necessary.

Object to mandatory diversity or inclusivity training that requires a prescribed outcome only, without incurring punishment for dissent: if you can’t openly express your gender critical view or state your belief in basic biological constructs this is not very inclusive, is it?!

Don’t repress bad ideas, engage and defeat them: telling people “you’re wrong” is not the way forward. Get them to explain their thinking. You will probably discover that many haven’t actually done much thinking, but are just parroting something that they heard somewhere.

Expose them to fair scrutiny and they will implode: applied postmodernism has a design flaw: it is inherently chaotic and therefore ultimately self destructive as in any system that is formulated around identities, rather than people.

Up next: What happens when birth and breastfeeding are captured?