There’s a Name for Insisting That Your Way is The Only Way
Exporting queer theory is just the latest example of Western cultural imperialism
Humans are a tribal and hierarchical species; evidence for this statement is all around us. We feel an affinity for those around us, especially family members and those who live in close geographical proximity. Most people are very aware of where they are in the ‘pecking order’ of both intimates and in our work situations.
On a minor level this is no problem and can lead to greater societal cohesiveness; think sports teams. There would be no sporting competitions without that tribal attribute. Absent this element, a group of people would just randomly collect, divide themselves into two or more teams and play, but that’s not how it works for our species.
Many great empires have come and gone over the course of recorded human history. One of the first notable examples of one society conquering others by imposing its culture is embodied in the man known in English as Alexander the Great. Greek culture, also known as Hellenism, was spread far and wide, well beyond the borders of modern day or ancient Greece by this man. By forcing long standing cultures to capitulate to his will or to be destroyed by his vast army, Alexander was a man on a mission, and this was to make everyone bend to his will and adopt what he considered to be the peak of cultural superiority.
The British empire at its acme, covered nearly the same surface area as our moon. At one point it contained 24% of the earth’s total land area and 23% of the world’s population. The British explorers and colonizers forever changed everywhere they went and are probably responsible for the fact that I am writing this, and you are reading it in English, not some other language. How many native sports have died so that cricket and rugby are now national games in what were formerly far-flung bits of empire?
The citizens of the USA largely regard themselves as having successfully escaped being colonized by the British and can be woefully ignorant of their own very successful colonizing of other countries and cultures and the fact that the USA still maintains a colonial presence overseas. How many Americans visiting foreign lands are relieved and grateful to spot the McDonald’s golden arches, which means they won’t have to eat any “strange” food? Those golden arches are a symbol of cultural imperialism because they replace an existing food source, while at the same time make a cultural statement about what is “best”.
How does cultural imperialism work?
Cultural imperialism is not all invading armies and pillaging the natives. It is the deliberate replacement of what already existed to the foreign mode, and rendering this to the eventual state of acceptance of the conquest to the point where people may even forget that there used to be another way of being. It is a transitional process that entails both a forgetting (of previous traditions) and an embracing of the foreign to the domestic.
It often unfolds sequentially like this:
Step 1: the explorers. These are the first to occupy this new space. Sometimes they are sent out deliberately to secure something that is needed; sometimes they are just adventurers. One of their jobs is to see what resources are available. These can include ‘hard’ goods such as minerals, as well as ‘soft’ goods such as entire populations.
Step 2: the enforcers. Forced acculturation soon follows. Forced religious belief is one tool that has been used by every colonizing culture on the planet, often backed up by an overwhelming military force. Linguistic imperialism often goes hand in hand; the use of compelled language is necessary for compliance in assimilating the foreign ideas and concepts being imposed on the conquered people. Deception and coercion are tools for imposing the ‘new order’ on the target population.
Step 3: the politicians. Politicians socialize the space into the conquered territory by establishing laws and norms that promote the imperialistic aims of the new order and by prohibiting or criminalizing the old systems. They may offer incentives to ‘forget’ the previous norms and mores, while punishing those resistant to the imposed societal changes. Silencing is necessary to subdue any non-cooperating bits of resistance.
A contemporary example is Chinese treatment of the Uighur population. They are barred from freely practicing their religion, speaking their language, and expressing other fundamental elements of their identity. Restrictions apply to many aspects of life, including dress, language, diet, and education. The Chinese government closely monitors Uighur religious institutions. Even ordinary acts such as praying or going to a mosque may be a basis for arrest or detention.
Money as a mechanism for cultural imperialism: in other settings this would be called bribery and extortion
In 1984 then US President Ronald Reagan signed an Executive Order that prevented government funding going to any foreign medical facilities that provided abortions. The US government is a major funder for overseas health providers in less developed countries so this really had an impact. Unfortunately, not the impact they were hoping for.
Because of course, any clinics that provided pregnancy terminations were mainly engaged in other aspects of women’s health such as providing contraception, pregnancy care and breast screening. Those facilities who resisted the call to stop doing any abortions (so stayed open to provide the full range of services) and lost this money were not able to find it elsewhere so had to limit what they could do. Which translated, meant that pregnancy rates rose (less contraception was available) and pregnancy termination rates also rose (because there was less contraception use so more unwanted and unplanned pregnancies).
Uganda recently passed an Anti-Homosexuality Law, with the aim of protecting marriage and children by imposing criminal penalties on acts of sodomy and homosexual rape of children and the vulnerable.
I personally do not support this sort of anti-gay law, but I respect the rights of sovereign countries to enact legislation that their people support. The World Bank, however, does not. It has stated that its funded projects will remain, but no new money will be lent to Uganda while this law remains. As a result, the Ugandan budget will have to be reworked and some government services to citizens will be curtailed.
Ugandan President Museveni stated, “It is, therefore, unfortunate that the World Bank and other actors dare to want to coerce us into abandoning our faith, culture, principles and sovereignty, using money. They really underestimate all Africans”.
The ultimate con job: queer theory
I have written previously about what queer theory is and what it does when implemented. In its origins, queer theory arose as a gay and lesbian complaint against heteronormativity; its stated aim was to ‘break the binary’ of sex. This of course is not impossible to do in an academic setting which is discussing philosophy, but taking it forward into real life settings it runs into some practical problems, since all mammalian reproduction is based on a binary system and we can’t choose which bit of the binary we were “assigned at birth” (sic).
Analyzing anything with a queer perspective has the potential to undermine the base structure on which any identity relies and at the start of application of this theory it was understood to be just about questions of sexuality. This perception that queer theory is solely about sexuality has been both opposed and expanded by using an “intersectional” approach that starts off with the hypothesis that sexuality cannot be disconnected from the other categories such as social status and identity. This allows queer theory to become applied to everything and thus blur the boundaries of reality well past the point of delusional thinking.
Gender ideology is one result of queer theory and this is not good news for women. Because gender ideology privileges gender identity, what someone says they are, over biological sex. But gender identity is not more important than sex, and an understanding of sex can't be replaced, or ignored, in favour of gender identity.
It changes the discourse so that sex simply disappears into gender identity, and pretends that women can just ‘identify’ out of their sex class. However we can’t leave the material, embodied reality of our lives; not the sexism, the oppression and sexed based violence, pay gaps and the risks to safety faced by all women in our world, or the stereotypes and expectations that disadvantage us from birth.
If gender identity was a real thing, other than just a Western philosophical concept, then women’s situations in countries like Afghanistan would not be so dire because all the women there could throw off their burkas and just declare themselves to be really men with breasts.
Note to Western academics: not all countries are liberal democracies
I and probably most of you reading this live in countries embracing liberal democracy. Liberal democracies share characteristics such as believing in equality and individual liberty, which supports private property and individual rights.These countries support the idea of limited constitutional government and recognize the importance of related values such as pluralism, tolerance, autonomy, bodily integrity, and individual consent.
On the other hand, countries that are labeled as conservative hold different views about what is important and what is prioritized.
Conservative countries tend to be less individualistic, and believe that society is not merely a loose collection of individuals but an assemblage of closely connected, interdependent members. They value institutions and practices that represent continuity and stability and believe that governments have a responsibility to resist the temptation to transform society and politics.
There can be a wide gulf between these two societal ways of operating and they are not necessarily better or worse, but they are very different.
Approximately 88 countries that are on the conservative end of the spectrum and are mostly in the developing world, have laws reflecting their cultural distaste for LGBTQ+ activities and lifestyles. Sanctions range from fines and imprisonment (for varying periods, up to and including life) all the way to the death penalty. Iran is an outlier in that homosexuals can be executed, but they can also “change” sex and their legal gender markers thus providing the ultimate service of “transing the gay away”.
Some Global North exports are well entrenched in conservative countries. Think Coca Cola, KFC, Netflix and the aforementioned McDonalds.
But here is a list of countries that have banned the new “Barbie” movie. The reasons given by most of these countries are that this movie celebrates homosexuality, sexual transformation and other “Western deviances”. Which brings me to the point of this post.
Beliefs are not facts and are not shared by all
The imposition of queer theory on other cultures is just another example of cultural imperialism. Queer theory is not the same as say, the theory of gravity or evolution. It is not testable or constant, nor does it have a clear and distinct perspective. It could be described as a belief framework and is totally contingent on peoples’ affirmation of it.
Because queer theory deliberately posits that biology is not real (or at the very least, not as important as social construction), it undermines women and the safeguarding that has been created as necessary to accommodate women’s presence in the public sphere. Blurring the boundaries of sex and gender allows male bodied people to invade previously private public spaces used by women alone. It also harms children by telling them lies and creates adult accomplices to bodily harms that cannot be reversed.
By reducing the physiological reality of woman to yet another gender identity, it denies the reality of sex, which is the entire foundation for human reproduction. Gender identity is not more important than sex, and an understanding of sex can't be replaced, or ignored, in favour of gender identity. Prioritizing gender is how you can pretend that biology doesn’t exist, that sex is irrelevant to reproduction and that feelings are the most important aspect of a person’s humanity.
Stating a belief in queer theory or gender ideology is not legal globally and forcing them on people is akin to transporting them into a cult.
Bringing infant formula into Africa: an example of cultural imperialism that has killed millions of babies
As long ago as 1939, Dr Cicely Williams delivered a famously stinging rebuke to the Singapore Rotary Club, accusing them of complacency in allowing infant formula manufacturers to send “milk-nurses” in white uniforms around the tenements of Singapore promoting the use of breast milk substitutes to unsophisticated mothers, concluding that “Misguided propaganda on infant feeding should be punished as the most criminal form of sedition, and that those deaths should be regarded as murder.”
Beginning in 1997, and for the next 12 years, WHO, UNICEF and UNAIDS, embarked on a Prevention of Mother to Child HIV Programme, with the goal of eventually rolling it out to hundreds of thousands of mothers in the poorest countries in the world. Their goal was to persuade mothers to abandon breastfeeding in favour of formula. They invoked maternal human rights with their position that mothers had the right to choose to formula feed in order to save their babies from breastfeeding associated transmission of the HIV virus. Not only was there no existing evidence to underpin the theory that formula would be healthier; on the contrary, it was already known that formula feeding in environments without clean water and a readily available medical system (not to mention mothers who could read and follow written instructions) could lead to greatly increased risks of infant morbidity and mortality, but even more astounding was that these agencies never intended to monitor the health outcomes of their global initiative. Even today it is unknown how many babies were saved from HIV infection through not being breastfed, or how many died because breastfeeding was withheld from them.
But the narrative women in Africa were sold was the Western notion that the mother had the right to make an informed choice about how she would feed her baby, and be supported in carrying out her decision. Invoking the concept of choice, rather than medical advice, to avoid transmission of a deadly disease apparently transmitted through mother's milk, was particularly unexpected. While the wording was politically correct, the meaning was deceptive. In Europe and North America, where bottle feeding was (and in many places still is) the norm, promotion of infant feeding choice might open the door to a healthier alternative, which is breastfeeding. But when choice, dressed up as a universal human right, was newly imported into an existing breastfeeding culture, it could only mean the choice not to breastfeed. The consequences for the health and survival of millions of babies on the world’s poorest continent were potentially catastrophic.
Even the concept of human rights can be a cultural imposition on societies that don’t share Western values.
In fact, in developing countries, where mothers do not expect to feed their babies in any other way but at the breast, a new suggestion that there should be a choice (i.e. a choice not to breastfeed) constitutes not a choice, but an iatrogenic intervention. An ethical medical intervention must provide some benefit. But in areas where infant mortality is already high, it is unethical to introduce a choice not to breastfeed. It does not empower women to be choose to bottle feed, which places their babies in jeopardy and increases infant mortality. (Additionally, it adds to the burden of women who, without the protective contraceptive effects that breastfeeding confers, will find themselves pregnant again well before their bodies have recovered from gestating and birthing their current baby.)
When cultural imperialism is is imposed on a society, bad things can happen.
Women might reasonably expect that health professionals in white lab coats or indeed well-meaning organizations that previously supported mothers to breastfeed would not give them a choice to harm their babies. But in the African setting with the complications and lack of knowledge around HIV transmission, this turned out be untrue.
The entire history of Western cultural imperialism and forced colonization is replete with examples of unintended consequences of harm to populations forced into assimilating values they neither understand, nor share. Even “guidance” into more modern (as perceived by the imperialists) ways of living can cause great harms and is often accompanied by funding, which turns persuasion into coercion as previously noted.
Queer theory meets sexed reality: La Leche League as a case study
La Leche League International (LLLI) is a women founded/mother led support group for women wanting to breastfeed their babies. Their Mission Statement is clear and unequivocal:
Our Mission is to help mothers worldwide to breastfeed through mother-to-mother support, encouragement, information, and education, and to promote a better understanding of breastfeeding as an important element in the healthy development of the baby and mother.
Nothing in there about helping “everyone” who may fancy to breastfeed a baby. But as LLLI has now leapt onto the Rainbow Trail created by queer theory, they now are telling Leaders (who are all voluntary breastfeeding supporters who have birthed and breastfed their own children) that they need to prioritize the wants of men with lactophilia (a sex fetish based on breast milk) and women who think they are men (so have deliberately removed their breasts and have lost the capability to breastfeed) over the actual needs of babies through their policy on inclusivity that all Leaders are required to swear fealty to if they wish to remain Leaders:
LLLI is committed to serving everyone inclusive of race, ethnicity, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, age, marital status, physical or mental ability, socio-economic status, political views, gender identity, sexual orientation, family structure, or other protected status.
Anyone who isn’t living on Planet Genderwoo understands that birth and breastfeeding are sexed, not gendered activities. And that breastfeeding requires well, at least one functioning breast. But all their information outlets are now supposed to pretend that breastfeeding is a gender-neutral function, as reflected in their global health messaging and the decision to use “a variety of terms” for the word mother.
The use of “a variety of terms” in place of the universal mother is a form of coerced speech that promotes the imposition of queer theory and gender ideology as a manifestation of cultural imperialism.
By not consistently using reality-based terms to talk about sex specific processes LLL is complicit in the myth making that “everyone” who wants to breastfeed should be supported to do so. If everyone includes males who have not given birth (which is 100% of them), babies are being subjected to no more than medical experimentation and women are being harmed because they are not breastfeeding after giving birth. For LLL to support this represents a major divergence from its previous stance of only promoting evidence-based research to back up practices and educational resources.
La Leche League has promoted language changes that interfere with how mothers communicate about breastfeeding. From a medical and supporting perspective, Leaders must be able to use proper terminology when discussing breastfeeding questions with mothers. By acceding to the trans rights agenda LLL has created an impossible situation for Leaders; they must now use made up words (such as “chestfeeding”) about female anatomy to explain biological facts. Additionally, they must embrace the fiction that ‘not all mothers are women’.
This contravenes the Mission Statement by embracing an entire ideology that undermines women and privileges men.
It condones and celebrates women trying to alter their bodies to match a gender identity via surgical removal of their breasts (along with any chance of breastfeeding, and a distortion of their biochemistry by testosterone. A gender identity, any one of the many on offer today should never obscure the reality of sex. Only the fact of their female bodies allows the possibility of pregnancy, but “chest masculinization surgery” guarantees that the maternal and infant health optimization benefits of breastfeeding will be an accomplishment closed off for them.
Biological sex is the most inclusive category of all women across all nationalities, cultures and throughout human history. Every human language has a word for mother, but not all have a word for parent and, for those that do it is often the same as the word for “father”. LLLI is a global organization and while all their resources are available in English, they have a large cache of training materials and breastfeeding information in many other languages too.
In addition to creating confusing messaging for women, LLL is possibly endangering its volunteer Leaders. At least 41% of countries where LGBTQ+ people are criminalized have an LLL presence.
Some countries on the list of those who are intolerant of “deviant” lifestyles take this to the next level:
Anyone who speaks out in support of, meets with, or participates in a group advocating for the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people also risks 10 years in prison.
By prescribing a penalty for people who know or “abet” same-sex relationships, the friends and families of LGBTQ+ people are criminalized. A Leader supporting a lesbian couple in breastfeeding could be risking arrest and jail time for helping a mother who is in a relationship with another woman. It could be unwise for a Leader in one of these countries to have in her possession LLLI materials that are promoted under the policy of inclusivity.
It is not for LLL to tell Leaders that they will be safe because they are “just” providing breastfeeding support. Countries will have their own ways of interpreting whether or not aiding others or being in possession of books or internet searches are legal or illegal.
Some Leaders have even been culturally incompetent enough to suggest that demanding this particular brand of “inclusivity” would be beneficial for societies that exclude LGBTQ+ citizens from any form of public life, but they are all living in countries where they can safely say anything out loud with no penalties at all. Like the agencies who rode into Africa on their mighty steeds of maternal “choice”, they and their babies face no consequences for their beliefs.
The imposition of the beliefs of one culture, who believe themselves to be more aware, more just, more knowledgeable and more “right” upon another culture, who they deem to be less knowledgeable, less sophisticated, less socially enlightened and in need of guidance and encouragement is cultural imperialism.
Exporting and prioritizing the wants and desires of adults over the actual needs of babies and condoning and celebrating the rupture of the mother/baby dyad has never before been the mission of La Leche League.
i feel like the third world war started with the internet. particularly with pornography which is propaganda that colonised the minds of the world. it was the beginning of outright war not just against women but also against healthy loving men. pornography scripted intimacy and by doing so has undone humanity at the most primal level. it replaced intimacy with violence. it's been all downhill since then. it makes me sad for my children. and everyone else's.
Excellent and important as always. Thank you Lucy. The chart from LLL is shocking. Along with all the madness on it, it supports the sale and donation of ova and surrogacy as though women's reproductive systems, at all ages and stages, are harvesting factories. The debasement of women in any area is a downfall for all women.