An excerpt on the problem of woke gender conceptions

As previously mentioned, I’ll be providing to paid supporters working notes and occasional excerpts of my manuscript-in-progress.

Earlier editions of this series are here: #1 #2

What follows is an excerpt from a chapter discussing the matter of “declarative” gender. This is a very new idea (within the last three decades, but really only in currency in the last five to ten years) about gender and sexual difference, and one that forms a core belief of woke ideology.

The question of gender identity is probably the most contentious of the current identity categories for the left, and also perhaps the most internally incoherent. Undoubtedly, this incoherency is at least partially due to its very recent creation as an ideological concept, much newer than race and class.

Though this may seem surprising, the word “gender” itself only came into common use to reference sexual difference in the early 1900’s. Before then, “sex” was the dominant term, but as noted by etymologists:

As sex (n.) took on erotic qualities in 20c., gender came to be the usual English word for “sex of a human being,” in which use it was at first regarded as colloquial or humorous. Later often in feminist writing with reference to social attributes as much as biological qualities; this sense first attested 1963.

Gender’s shift from a mere synonym for sex to describe biological or physical characteristics to a concept which also described social traits took several decades to fully manifest, but a second shift occurred famously (and in a famously obtuse way) in 1990, with the publication of Judith Butler’s book, Gender Trouble. Whereas in the previous few decades gender had come to be seen by feminists as the social reality of sexual difference, Judith Butler argued that gender and sex were both mere discursive subjects. That is, neither sex nor gender had any physical reality or existence outside of the way we thought about them and “performed” them in our lives and interactions.

To put this long transition more plainly: gender, which was initially just a polite synonym for sex, came to be seen through “second-wave” feminist writers as a term defining social aspects of sexual difference. A person was biologically male or female, but what made a man or woman on the social level wasn’t just their genitalia but rather their masculine or feminine expressions. This way of thinking led to a de-synchronization of the two concepts, such that you could be a “feminine” male or a “masculine” woman, and it also led to a de-prioritization of the physical or biological category of sex to focus instead on the study of gender and gender relations.

Judith Butler’s work led to the final severance of the link between these two categories, but it went even further than this. Rather than merely suggesting (social) gender and (physical) sex were unrelated to each other, Butler argued that neither of these concepts referred to any physical reality at all. Gender and sex—and the differences they described—were mere constructs, artificial categories humans created. We only performed or acted out gender and sex, and it was our “performativity” which gave these concepts any semblance of life.

The consequences of this shift in thinking have been rather profound, and manifest particularly in the political strife and conflict regarding transgender politics. If sex and gender are, as Butler argued, only socially-created categories sustained by our belief in their existence and our subsequent performance of that belief, then belief and performance can create other realities. Thus, if a person believes they are male or a man, and then performs maleness or masculinity, then any physical characteristics which might suggest otherwise (a penis and a body shaped from puberty by higher levels of testosterone than estrogen) are utterly irrelevant to that identity.

Perhaps as an unintended or unforeseen consequence, because the performance of gender is itself a social construction (what does it mean to “perform” masculinity if there is not really such a thing as males or men?), this has now led to the current phenomenon of declarative gender or “self-identification” for gender. Now fully divorced from any reference to physical traits, one needs only declare themselves a man, a woman, nonbinary, or trans for it to be truthful.

Declarative gender is the core point of strife regarding trans identity for older feminists (including so-called Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists or TERFs), the traditional left, and much of the general public. The reason for this strife is that legal protections and cultural spaces for women were crafted on the basis of physical and biological differences between males and females.

Women’s sporting events, for example, were created upon the understanding that females are physically different from males and generally have certain disadvantages in sports when compared to a typical or average male athlete. Laws guaranteeing rights to abortion access and contraceptives, as another example, are premised upon the physical reality that biological females can become pregnant and require additional access to services to prevent or end those pregnancies that males do not require. Rape, though it absolutely also occurs to men and is also committed by women, is overwhelmingly a physical assault directed at biological women, overwhelmingly by biological males. And the logic of private spaces for women—for instance, changing rooms in gyms and schools—is predicated upon the physical reality that some biological males not only tend to seek out moments of female nudity for sexual arousal, but can on average physically overpower and menace women in states of undress.

If, as Butler argued, gender and sex are merely constructs we perform; and if, as current woke politics asserts, gender is merely a matter of declaration, then the recognition of difference upon which those legal and cultural rights and spaces were built crumbles. That doesn’t necessarily mean that new legal and cultural formulations cannot be created to address these concerns, but it’s difficult to find evidence of such work being undertaken…

…In a later essay for The Guardian, Judith Butler greatly expanded upon her argument that any kind of reaction to this newer conception of gender (socially-constructed, performative, declarative) is not just inherently right-wing, but also fascist:

Anti-gender movements are not just reactionary but fascist trends, the kind that support increasingly authoritarian governments. The inconsistency of their arguments and their equal opportunity approach to rhetorical strategies of the left and right, produce a confusing discourse for some, a compelling one for others. But they are typical of fascist movements that twist rationality to suit hyper-nationalist aims.

While there are certainly right-aligned movements who oppose this new conception of gender divorced from any physical traits or characteristics, and though it is rather ironic that Butler suggests there is an effort by critics of this new conception to “produce a confusing discourse,” it’s both spurious and a bit infantilizing to claim all such critiques are fascist trends.

Again, this conception of gender is a very new one, born in academia just a little over three decades ago and only recently popularized in the last ten years through social media and click-bait articles from sites like Everyday Feminism. Changes in legal classification of people from sex to gender are hardly widespread, and only very recently have some governments begun to allow self-declaration of gender without medical or therapeutic documentation. For instance, as of this writing only 16 nations allow declarations of gender self-identification without other documentation, and some of those (for instance, Denmark), mandate a “reflection period” after the declaration in order to prevent potential abuse of the legal process.

Polling and surveys often show people are more accepting of transgendered recognition when tied to medical diagnoses or mandated periods of social transition (living as the declared gender for a time before legal recognition). In other words, there seems to be a general acceptance of transgender identity by large parts of the public, but not of declarative gender divorced from material conditions or physical reality. This would suggest we still have a sense that, rather than being merely a construct created through performance and belief, most people suspect that gender is still tied at some level to physical traits.

If that is so, then Butler’s assertion that opposition to this newer conception is “not just reactionary but fascist” is at best heavy-handed. However, Butler is hardly the only theorist to assert this. Trans activists such as Julia Serano repeatedly assert connections between criticism of declarative gender and right wing movements, and many Antifa websites and social media accounts make clear that any criticism of this new conception of gender is essentially fascist.

Conflating any criticism or concerns about this new conception of gender with extreme nationalist and racist movements certainly is politically effective, but the question really needs to be asked: is a woman who reported sexual harassment or assault by self-declared trans woman with an erect penis in an intimate space really a fascist? What about a victim of rape in a crisis center—is she fascist for preferring not to be housed in the same intimate spaces with someone she perceives to be male and therefore a potential abuser? Is it really fascist for an athlete to prefer competing against people of her biological sex rather than trans women whose bodies were shaped by the higher amounts of testosterone found in males rather than in females?

You’ll note in these questions that the primary concern relates to women rather than men. This is because of something older feminist theorists pointed to long before gender became divorced from sex: men tend to dominate and physically abuse women much more often then women do to men. The proposed reasons for why this occurs are varied (inherent differences between men and women, patriarchal legal regimes, differences in the socialization of boys and girls), but the material reality is nevertheless undisputed. Men lose very little in regards to rights and protections under these newer conceptions of gender, because these older cultural and legal forms were not created to protect men from women, but rather to protect women from men and allow women to have more access to resources and activities where men dominated.

Especially in regards to reproduction, women have a separate set of concerns which men lack. A man cannot be forced to conceive, carry, and give birth to a child, because he is physically incapable of doing these things. He will not be fired from a job because he is pregnant and will require leave from work for the birth and early nurturing, because he cannot get pregnant or give birth.

Attempts to accommodate these older concerns into the newer ideological formation of gender have resulted in some very clumsy and often absurd rhetoric. For instance, stripping reference to sexual or gender characteristics in order to be more inclusive of trans and non-binary identity has resulted in often laughable terms such as “uterus-havers,” “chest-feeding,” and “menstruators.” In these attempts, however, we get a glimpse of how the physical—otherwise deprioritized or even completely denied—reasserts itself back into these narratives.

We can even be forgiven for suspecting that the physical “haunts” this new conception of gender. As Silvia Federici pointed out, a trans woman reasserts the existence of such a thing as woman, otherwise there would be nothing to transition into. That is, despite the current dogma that gender is a “felt sense” unrelated to the physical body, and also something we construct and perform rather than something that points to a pre-existing state, even the strongest believers in the new gender framework are unable fully to avoid the idea of physically-existing sexual difference.